Tag: Thomas Jefferson

Thomas Jefferson’s commonplace book

February 12th, 2024

Indeed, judging by Jefferson’s literary commonplace book, into which he copied passages from authors who had caught his attention, Maury immersed the young man in the classics. There are few better ways to study a literary passage than to write it out in one’s own hand, feeling each word and following the flow of thought.
– Thomas E. Ricks

Ricks, Thomas E.. First Principles: What America’s Founders Learned from the Greeks and Romans and How That Shaped Our Country. United States, HarperCollins, 2020. pp67
Thomas Jefferson: Mammoth Obsessive

October 29th, 2022

We’ve covered how Thomas Jeffs was interested in everything. And we mean everything. But we were still surprised to discover Jefferson’s mammoth obsession. One doesn’t immediately think, founding father and mammoth. But one must remember TJeffs was a cut of different fabric.

As American paleontologist, professor, and author, Steve Brusatte writes:

One American colonist became obsessed with mammoths.

This is one of my favorite sentences ever written. The content — An American colonist’s bizarre obsession. And that Steven Brusatte resists announcing it’s Thomas Jefferson, hiding him behind the noun “colonist”. Let’s continue:

One American colonist became obsessed with mammoths. During the late 1700s, there was a lot on Thomas Jefferson’s mind-writing the Declaration of Independence, winning a Revolutionary War, preventing his new country from falling apart, running two of the most contentious presidential campaigns in American history, and raising (or at least producing) two families. Through it all, he kept thinking about mammoths. And writing about mammoths, begging people to send him mammoth bones, ordering generals to procure mammoth skeletons. In part, this was escapism. Jefferson loved nature, and, in his words, preferred “the tranquil pursuits of science” to the pugilism of politics.
Brusatte, Steven. The Rise and Reign of the Mammals: A New History, from the Shadow of the Dinosaurs to Us. Boston: Mariner Books, 2022. (see page 326)

Most would escape into drink or theater. Thomas Jefferson escaped into mammoths. And this wasn’t a side hobby, this man was ordering generals to hunt down mammoth skeletons.

But Steven Brusatte reveals, this obsession did have other motivations. Mainly debunking Comte de Buffon’s theory that North American climates spawned weak animal species and cold people. Thomas Jefferson wasn’t letting that shit stand! He fought back with mammoths:

But he had grander reasons, too. In a bestselling book, the noble French naturalist Comte de Buffon had presented his “Theory of American Degeneracy,” which held that the cool and wet climates of North America caused its animals to be “feeble” and its people to be “cold,” compared to the grandeur of the Old World. Hyper with patriotism, Jefferson saw the mammoth — an elephant larger than those of Africa and Asia! — as his ultimate comeback. It was proof that America was not a backwater, but a land of vitality, with a bright and industrious future.
Brusatte, Steven. The Rise and Reign of the Mammals: A New History, from the Shadow of the Dinosaurs to Us. Boston: Mariner Books, 2022. (see page 326)

Could you imagine today, a mammoth, a prehistoric creature of any kind, being used as a smack-talk comeback for international rhetoric?

Or a mammoth being a symbol of vitality?

Or having a president that cared at all about mammoths?
Book blurbin’ – Sam Anderson on John McPhee

September 24th, 2022

McPhee has built a career on…small detonations of knowledge. His mind is pure curiosity: It aspires to flow into every last corner of the world, especially the places most of us overlook…McPhee’s work is not melancholy, macabre, sad or defeatist. It is full of life. Learning, for him, is a way of loving the world, savoring it, before it’s gone. In the grand cosmology of John McPhee, all the earth’s facts touch one another-all its regions, creatures, and eras. It’s absences and presences. Fish, trucks, atoms, bears, whiskey, grass, rocks, lacrosse, weird prehistoric oysters, grandchildren and Pangea. Every part of time touches every other part of time.
– Sam Anderson
McPhee, John. The Patch. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018 (see back cover blurb, hardcover edition)

I wanted to capture this passage for the language: Words like macabre and detonations stoke the linguistic fires. And nudge me towards the dictionary.

But also, it’s a returning theme in this commonplace book – curiosity.

The people that fascinate me; the Thomas Jeffersons, the Paul Otlets, the Temple Grandins, the Benjamin Rushes, are eternally curious. And curious about an eternal amount of subjects.

Sam Anderson is spot on. Learning is a way to love and savor our world.
Thomas Jefferson: A man interested in everything

September 9th, 2022

From Friends Divided: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson.

Two solid paragraphs from Gordon S. Wood on Thomas Jefferson’s endless curiosity.

He was interested in more things and knew about more things than any other American. When he was abroad he traveled to more varied places in Europe than Adam’s ever did, and kept a detailed record of all that he had seen, especially of the many vineyards he visited.
Wood, Gordon S. Friends Divided: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. New York: Penguin Press, 2017. pg. 10

Not sure how one measures that Jefferson was interested in more things, and knew more things than any other American, but I trust Mr. Wood here. Also, Jefferson’s record keeping is legendary.

He amassed nearly seven thousand books and consulted them constantly; he wanted both his library and his mind to embrace virtually all of human knowledge, and he came as close to that embrace as an eighteenth century American could. Every aspect of natural history and science fascinated him.
Wood, Gordon S. Friends Divided: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. New York: Penguin Press, 2017. pg. 10, 11

It wasn’t enough that Thomas Jefferson owned seven thousand books. He consulted them regularly.

He knew about flowers, plants, birds, and animals, and he had a passion for all facets of agriculture. He had a fascination for meteorology, archaeology, and the origins of the American Indians. He loved mathematics and sought to apply mathematical principles to almost everything, from coinage and weights and measures to the frequency of rebellions and the length of people’s lives. He was an inveterate tinkerer and inventor and was constantly thinking of newer and better ways of doing things, whether it was plowing, the copying of handwriting, or measuring distances.
Wood, Gordon S. Friends Divided: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. New York: Penguin Press, 2017. pg. 11

It’s hard to think of any modern, public person, with Jefferson’s insatiable appetite for “all of human knowledge”.
Record keepers: How John Adams and Thomas Jefferson recorded their days

July 4th, 2022

John Adams kept a journal. Spared no thought or criticism. Emotions splattered on the page:

Keeping as full and honest a diary as he did was part of the inheritance passed on from his Puritan ancestors; but it was also an inevitable response to his acute self-awareness. None of his colleagues and in fact no American in the eighteenth century kept a diary like that of Adams. In it he poured out all his feelings — all his anxieties and ambitions, all his jealousies and resentments.
Friends Divided: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, Chapter One, Contrasts, pg 25. Gordon S. Wood

It takes courage to keep a diary as Adams did. Surely he must’ve known it would be read by the public at some point in time. To record one’s insecurities and shortcomings is therapeutic and brave.

Wood continues:

Adams used his diary to begin a lifelong struggle with what he often considered his unworthy pride and passions. “He is not a wise man and is unfit to fill any important Station in Society, that has left one Passion in his Soul unsubdued.” Like his seventeenth-century Puritan ancestors, he could not have success without guilt.
Friends Divided: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, Chapter One, Contrasts, pg 25, 26. Gordon S. Wood

John Adams was TMI. Thomas Jefferson stayed mysterious:

It is impossible to imagine Jefferson writing such a journal. Jefferson was always reserved and self possessed and, unlike Adams, he scarcely ever revealed much of his inner self. Jefferson seemed to open up to no one, while Adams at times seemed to open up to everyone. He certainly opened up to his diary. “Honesty, Sincerity, and openness, I esteem essential marks of a good mind,” he wrote, and once he got going his candid entries bore out that judgement.
Friends Divided: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, Chapter One, Contrasts, pg 25. Gordon S. Wood

Thomas Jefferson in contrast, ditched the diary. He recorded facts:

Jefferson kept no diary, and if he had, he would never have expressed any self-loathing in it. Instead of a diary, Jefferson kept records — records, it seems, of everything, with what he called “scrupulous fidelity.” He religiously recorded the weather, taking the temperature twice a day, once in the morning and again at four in the afternoon. He entered into memorandum books every financial transaction, every source of income and every expenditure, no matter how small or how large — seven pennies for chickens or thousands of dollars for a land sale.
Friends Divided: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, pg 27. Gordon S. Wood

No surprise then Thomas Jefferson kept an array of commonplace books:

He kept a variety of specialized books, including several commonplace books — a legal book, an equity book, and a literary book, in which he copied passages from his reading that he found important or interesting. He also kept a case book and a fee book, for tracking work and income from his legal career as long as it lasted; a farm book, in which he entered, among other things, the births and sales of slaves as well as farm animals; and a garden book. In his garden book, he made such notations as how many peas he was planting would fill a pint measure, how much fodder a horse would eat in a night, and how many cucumbers fifty hills would yield in a season.
Friends Divided: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, pg 27. Gordon S. Wood

Fascinating how John Adams and Thomas Jefferson’s personalities were reflected in their daily writing habits. The pugnacious Adams’ confessionals, and Jefferson’s facts only approach.

From Gordon S. Wood‘s book: Friends Divided: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson

Tag: Thomas Jefferson

Thomas Jefferson’s commonplace book

Thomas Jefferson: Mammoth Obsessive

Book blurbin’ – Sam Anderson on John McPhee

Thomas Jefferson: A man interested in everything

Record keepers: How John Adams and Thomas Jefferson recorded their days