Seeking Renewal on the Wendover Death March in the Footsteps of Lewis and Clark

FORT BENTON, MT.

I'm sitting out on the patio of the Grand Union Hotel looking at the Missouri River. This is the halfway point of my annual Lewis and Clark canoeing and hiking trip. We have spent the last three days paddling through the magnificent White Cliffs stretch of the Missouri. Tonight we regroup in a historic hotel (which mostly means showers). Tomorrow we head up to Lochsa Lodge on the Lolo Trail just inside Idaho (west of Missoula), and prepare for four days of hiking along the most pristine stretch of the entire Lewis & Clark trail from Charlottesville, VA, to Astoria, OR.

This year I'm joined by 35 adventurers from all over the United States—and one winsome young geologist from Australia. With my tour partner Becky, that makes our little corps of discovery about the same in size as the permanent party of the Lewis and Clark Expedition (1804-1805). The main difference is that we cannot establish military discipline. Last night one of the enlisted men engaged in an unauthorized incursion into our limited supply of liquor. After a wonderful midnight thunderstorm that woke and enchanted our urban guests, he went wandering through our camp like King Lear on the heath, tripping over guy lines, chanting patches of patriotic song, and invading tents of perfect strangers in search of his longsuffering wife. This produced a little chaos. We wanted to flog him at dawn, but he looked pretty self- or spouse-flogged, so we merely pardoned him to nurse his hangover. The mesh cowboy hat that he has been wearing all week looked as if it had gone through a tree shredder. I predict a long run of temperance in his future.

These are minor concerns. Each year for five years my canoe partner Becky has attempted to drown me in the Missouri River. She's a natural water nymph with a heart the size of Montana, but she has two exceedingly bad habits. She stands up from time to time in the canoe, and she turns around to take pictures, adjust her life vest, reach for something in her kit bag, ask me a question, or just tempt the river gods. No amount of caution or rebuke can prevent her from taking appalling risks, and every summer I lose not only my new camera—an expensive sacrifice to what Meriwether Lewis called the "mighty and heretofore deemed endless Missouri River"—but books, notes, GPS devices, journals (both my own and the expedition's). I went to my favorite camera store a few days before this trip to buy my fifth annual digital camera. The clerk said, "Ah, it's your annual Montana trip, is it?"

I can now report a miracle. My camera survived the canoe portion of the trip. We'll see how it fares on the Wendover Death March.

I don't know if I can explain why this annual trip means so much to me, but I am going to try. When you are out on the river drifting through some of the most enchanting scenery in America, or placing one foot in front of the other on a serious and strenuous hike directly in the footsteps of Lewis and Clark, you get out of yourself. You all know that persona you drag around almost every day of the year, full of fears and frets and frustrations and figments and frauds and foolhardiness. It's almost pure pleasure to check that tinny thing at the embarkation point, and become a more basic and authentic self for a few days. The camping trip tasks are very basic: paddle, hike, perform rudimentary acts of hygiene in rudimentary structures, sleep, eat, warm your hands in the fire in the chill of the evening, and get up in the middle of the night to pee in the dewy grass just outside your tent, and then linger in your shorts in the night chill to watch for a shooting star. The idea is to let the past slip away, put the future on hold at the other end of the journey, and just try to BE for a change. Feel the tinge of sunburn on your face and legs, the affirming strain in muscles you don't much use in what Huck Finn calls "sivilization," and let the long stretches of pure silence redeem your life.

There is also the "same time next year" phenomenon.

The Greek philosopher Heraclitus famously said "you can never enter the same river twice." That is true of the Missouri. This year it was down by three or four feet from last year. Last year's gravel-bottomed swimming hole was a mud bog this year. The air was easily ten degrees cooler this summer, and the afternoon swimming was therefore less imperative. Etc. But I also know I bring a different me to the river every year. My left shoulder was not a factor this time. I was more serious, less playful in the evening talks. I know why, though I'm not willing to explain it. People from all over the country insisted on my talking about the Bakken oil boom, even though I came out here in part to escape the oppressive never-endingness of that subject in my life. I threw myself into this year's adventure with none of my usual detachment—in part because there is so much I wish to escape from this year, and I am counting on the journey to provide spiritual renewal.

When we undertake the Wendover Death March Friday morning (nine miles more or less straight up) I will be listening to my body take that severe strain. Every summer I wonder when the year will finally come when I cannot make the hike—or, worse, choose not to make the hike. In a strange sort of way, this summer journey is my way of testing who I am, who I still am, and who I might be able to become, because the one constant is that a full year has passed since the last seemingly-identical journey.

The jury is still out about this year's Death March, which is led by my glorious young friend Chad, now just under 40, who prances and gambols and jibes his way up Wendover Ridge as if he were jogging to the corner post office, while the rest of us bend over and cough up a lung every ten minutes and curse the day Chad was born. The trip would not be worth making without Chad—who knows everything about the Bitterroot Mountains except the trees, which is a bit ironic if you think about it—and it certainly would not be worth making without Becky. They are the north stars of my summer.

Mostly I thank God I live in virtually the only country on earth where this is possible—where the population density is light in the heartland, where there is still plenty of public domain to play and wander in, where the qualities of wilderness and frontier still have some potency in our national soul, and where the words "the West" touch off a long reverie of romance, awe, redemption, mystery, and renewal.

"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately," said Thoreau. That indeed is my quest.

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The Etiquette of Texting in the Age of Electronic Loneliness

Yesterday I was being driven in a taxi from one part of Seattle to another. The taxi driver was a Muslim man who spent the entire twenty-six minutes talking in frenetic Arabic to someone on his cell phone. I don't know if they were making dinner plans or plotting revenge. All I know is that they were talking with great animation, and I didn't understand a single word my driver said. He was driving so fast that I was a little uneasy. Nor did it make my ride very pleasant to have to listen to what seemed like high-energy chatter, but I'm sure being able to multi-task in this way makes his work life less tedious and perhaps more productive. We drove through the fashionable Capitol Hill district of Seattle. On our right we passed a young man on a bicycle riding no hands and texting as he glided through traffic. That was the most creative (and dangerous) instance of texting I have seen so far. I suppose the ultimate would be to text while riding a bull in a rodeo. People must really want to text to take such risks.

What did we do before we could text Homo sapiens have been around for 250,000 years, and somehow we got by without texting until ten years ago. Now, approximately six billion texts are sent per day in the United States alone. Young Americans (18-29) send or receive on average 88 texts per day. The other night I sat at a long bar in a Seattle hotel and all eleven people sitting there were texting alone, concentrating even more on their cell phones than on their drinks. Not a single conversation of any sort was occurring between those eleven bodies. The bartender was texting, too. I was not texting, but I was reading a book on my iPad.

The Internet gave us the capacity to send emails at some point between 1995 and the millennium. The electronic letter phased out the paper-and-postage-stamp letter with breathtaking ruthlessness. I still send traditional letters to my daughter, and occasionally to others. She regards such letters as quaint relics of a forgotten age. She senses that a letter in the mailbox is somehow more significant than an email, but I can tell that she thinks it is a bit silly to deploy the resources of the US Postal System for six or seven days to deliver to her essentially the same words that I could have sent her instantaneously from anywhere on earth. The postal service is a reasonably efficient document delivery system now being displaced by a stunningly more efficient delivery system. I imagine when she receives a letter from me, it feels to her like that birthday card you used to get from your grandmother with a $5 check in it. You shake your head a little, even though you do appreciate the gesture.

I spend a lot of time in airports. Computers, cell phones, and texting have taken a lot of the tedium out of waiting for the next flight. It certainly beats that earlier phase of electronic culture when people carried little game devices around and played them in seat 23b with all their bells and dings and whistles blaring, as if they had a full grown pinball machine in front of them. What bothers me most now are the people who stop dead in their tracks in airport walking lanes, without warning, and when you lurch and scramble to avoid running them down, you discover they merely stopped to tap out a text. Hey Brad, 'sup This happens to me every time I fly now.

Texting is so addictive that once you are in there is no turning back. My mother is a great case in point. Sometime around 1998 I forced her to buy her first home computer. She resisted that rite of passage as if I were trying to put her in a rural nursing home. I'm too old, what would I do with it, I'd never be able to figure it out, I've lived my whole life without a computer, why would I need one now But of course the minute she had her first massive Gateway computer she recognized it as an essential tool of life. We went through the same nonsense about her first cell phone, her first laptop, and her first Nook. She relented in the end in the Battle of the Cell Phone by admitting that it might possibly save her life if she ran off the road in a blizzard. And for several years she used it only when she traveled. More recently we had a daylong argument about getting her a cell phone on which she could write texts. My fingers would be too clumsy on such a small keyboard, why cannot I just pick up the phone and call if I have something to say, I'm eighty years old for the gosh sakes, etc. This summer my amazingly persuasive daughter convinced my mother to buy her first iPhone, even though she had sworn earlier in the week that nothing could ever convince her to abandon a true keyboard for a touch pad. Now she nonchalantly exchanges texts with her granddaughter and with her significant other in Minneapolis, and a few days ago she somehow managed to send me a photograph from Cody, Wyoming. She has a fancy stylus for her phone. I'll look over at her and ask what she's doing Oh, just texting Russ (the S.O.) to see if he thinks Tiger or Phil will win the tournament. Oh my. As Hamlet put it, Is man no more than this?

One of the positive benefits of texting is that it makes us get to the point. It's the modern telegraph system. Nobody likes to tap out a 500-word note. I think it also invites us to be witty. A perfect text is worth a thousand words. It is certainly easier to text in one's regrets for not coming to a dinner party than making that call, which might end in the host persuading you to come, after all, or might leave you feeling like a lout. You can text what you dare not or would rather not say, and you can text at any time of day or night without necessarily disturbing the recipient.

Texting allows us to reach out to someone in a small way, without the duration and heavier implications of a phone conversation. Hey, thinking about you. Just wanted to make sure you are ok Don't forget to make the car payment. Have I said I love you yet today Texting is ideal for some types of communication. Think of how long that car payment phone call might have lasted and what Pandora's boxes it might have opened. The telegraph works better.

I have even heard of instances of people breaking up with their lovers by text—the rare Dear John text. Hard to believe anyone could ever be so barbarous and insensitive, but such things are a fair indicator of where we are and where we are headed as a culture.

C U next wk.

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The Healing Power of Laughter: Oh Larry and Mo Where Art Thou?

One of my favorite people has been in town, and it couldn't have come at a better time. His name is David Nicandri. He's one of the best Lewis and Clark scholars in the country. His book, River of Promise Lewis & Clark on the Columbia (published by our own Dakota Institute Press) has won rave reviews. One eminent historian has called it the best book on Lewis and Clark in a generation.

All that is great, but it is not why I cherish David Nicandri so much. There's an even better reason He has one of the greatest laughs of anyone I have ever known. When he finds something funny—and he does so several times per conversation—he throws his head back and releases an unguarded, unmistakable open-mouthed laugh. His laugh is always lusty and it is often wonderfully noisy. His laughter is no mere hee hee, or a muted uh, huh, huh, ha, huh. He's all in, as they say. If you were from Jupiter and hadn't figured out the human necessity for laughter, you might think he had just been stabbed with a spear. He laughs because he cannot help it. And then I laugh because I cannot help it. In a world of insincerity and disingenuous people (they are legion), I love the visceral authenticity of laughter.

Dr. Samuel Johnson, the literary dictator of 18th century London, and the author of the first great dictionary of the English language (1755) defined laughter as convulsive merriment. That's absolutely perfect. I'm not much of a laugher myself, but when I am in front of an audience and I manage to make people laugh—laugh until they double over, and turn and smile at each other—I am for that moment the happiest man alive.

Just why people laugh is something of a mystery. We know that apes laugh, by way of a form of gruff panting, and other animals, including non-primates, produce odd vocalizations during play. First laughter in human infants tends to occur between 3.5 and 4 months after birth, long before our children learn to speak. Most experts believe that laughter has more to do with social bonding than with humor per se. People seldom laugh alone. When I do, I'm always a little embarrassed. We know that laughter is highly contagious.

That's one reason I am so fond of David Nicandri. His laughter over the past few days has had two enormously healing effects on me. First, we tend to find the same things funny, often rather abstract things that only occur in the minds of people who have spent too much time reading about the same episodes in history. His laughter affirms my understanding of the quirks, tensions, and absurdities of the Lewis and Clark expedition. Second, his laughter is so wonderful that I find myself joining in (spontaneously) because I want to get on that bandwagon of joy and affirmation. In other words, his unforced, unconscious laughter triggers mine, because he is my dear friend, because I believe in his life and work, because (below the radar of consciousness) he gives me permission to laugh out loud, hard. And when we laugh out loud, hard, we cheer up. Perhaps we even heal.

My mentor Ev Albers used to laugh more than any serious person I have ever known. His laugh was a kind of heroic chuckle, but what made it so infectious is that it would last so long that eventually tears would be streaming down his cheeks, and he'd have to take his glasses off twice or thrice to dry them off. And he had the very unusual habit of not just inviting you to laugh with him but essentially forcing you to join in. He'd literally bring his massive face within a couple of inches of yours—invading your personal space, looking you straight in the eye from extremely close range—and in the end you'd be unable to resist joining in, if only for self-protection. Ev would close his laugh episode by saying, Oh my! in a sad emphatic sighing way, as if to say, Life is so unbearably painful in so many ways, that the only response to it that is not destructive, is to laugh.

We've all heard the following dialogue. I'm surprised you could laugh at such an awful thing that happened to you. And the response Well, it's either laugh or cry. I know plenty of people who have laughed until they cried or cried until finally they actually began to laugh. These convulsions are related somehow, and it is not always easy to tell the difference. They are both involuntary. They both bring about a release of pent up energy and emotion. They both have the capacity to bring catharsis and relief. How many times have you heard someone say, Afterwards I went home and had a good cry

Both Albers and Nicandri are men who know how to laugh at themselves. In fact, particularly to laugh at themselves. This may be the single most important source of sanity we have. And it makes them immensely likeable.

Back when I was married, I sometimes laughed in moments of crisis or alarm—the death of a relative in an improbable feedlot accident, a child's tumble down a flight of stairs, a sudden divorce filing after 48 years of seemingly happy marriage. She thought my laughter was inappropriate, even obscene, at such a moment. Perhaps it was. But it was something more, I think—an involuntary convulsion in watching the universe pull the rug out from under our complacent sense that we are immortal and that life is what it seems on any given Tuesday.

When they say laughter is the best medicine, the experts really mean it. The late Norman Cousins actually wrote a book about the power of laughter in the healing process. When he faced a seemingly terminal illness, he literally taught himself to laugh many times per day. I made the joyous discovery that ten minutes of genuine belly laughter had an anesthetic effect and would give me at least two hours of pain-free sleep, he later wrote. He watched episodes of The Three Stooges. When the pain-killing effect of the laughter wore off, we would switch on the motion picture projector again and not infrequently, it would lead to another pain-free interval.

No matter how unhappy I am, if I watch The Three Stooges or any of the Leslie Nielson Naked Gun movies, I cheer up. In his darkest or weariest hours, I would walk in on Ev Albers and find him wiping his eyes along that laughter-crying axis as he watched Mo poke Curly's eyes with a pitchfork.

One of Freud's most brilliant books is called Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious (1905). It's a really insightful study of what makes us laugh, and why. His view, essentially, was that humor occurs when the conscious mind permits the expression of something that society usually suppresses or forbids—aggression, sexual candor, or disruptive candor of any sort. Thus the old Henny Youngman joke, Take my wife-please, plays on the ambiguity of citing one's wife as an example (as in take the budget surplus, for example) and expressing a barely suppressed desire to get rid of her (take her off my hands). It's not a particularly funny joke, but its structure gets at the essence of what a joke does.

Mark Twain famously said, Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand. We are going to need a lot more laughter if we are going to punch through the paralysis of our time.

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Here Comes August: Time to Turn Things Up a Notch

So we've reached carpe diem time in a North Dakota summer. Seize the day. Before you know it, you'll begin to be bombarded by back to school advertising. I hate the moment in mid-summer when you walk into one of the box stores and bump up against massive back to school displays. It actually bothers me more than seeing Christmas decorations on the shelves before Thanksgiving, or that odd moment, the day after Valentine's Day, when all the Valentine's cards are brusquely pulled from the shelves at the grocery store and unsentimentally replaced by Easter Cards. That always seems so heartless to me, opportunistic in the worst sense.

There is only a narrow window left when the summer of 2013 will feel carefree and unending. How can it be almost August 1 The minute you sense autumn lurking out beyond the northern horizon, the rest of your summer activities will feel a little like a forced march. The joy then may be more intense (because we know all too well what's coming), but the essence of summer is that early July feeling that you are off the clock, that time is expansive or perhaps endless, that you are almost as carefree as you were growing up in a North Dakota town, when you burst out the banging screen door right after breakfast and came back in at the other end of the day, then only when your mother's voice got threatening. Bikes, bats, dirtballs, sprinklers, swings, forts, rafts, popsicles, the dank smell of the swimming pool locker room where you took the shortest rinse that could be regarded as compliance with pool rules.

The minute I hear the words NFL pre-season opener on television, I experience a wave of pure melancholy and loss. Too soon, too soon.

As far as I am concerned it has been a spectacular North Dakota summer. I have spent at least 20 evenings out on my deck with a breeze and a series of good books, reading a few pages, then sipping a glass of white wine, then drinking in the western sky and keeping on the lookout for Venus just above the horizon. And reading some more. In the past few weeks there have been just enough mosquitos to drive me inside at dusk, not enough to induce me to buy a Citronella candle.

In countless houses around North Dakota the following conversations are taking place today. If we're going to get out to the Medora Musical this summer, we'd better do it soon. If we're still going camping this summer, we'd better pick a weekend. If we're going to invite the Ricardos for a pontoon ride on the river, we'd better call them right away. If we are serious about driving out to the old farm to pick buffalo berries, we'd better figure out when.

I did get to do a picnic on a butte. My friend Joey was in town from Texas. He's a scion of the King Ranch family. With a group of anarchic merry makers from Beach, we made the ascent of Camels Hump Butte (3,273 feet). We established a base camp in a lovely grass bowl on the northeast side, and spread out a perfect evening picnic on erratic lichen-topped sandstones. Over dinner, the rancher who owns the thing (wouldn't you love to be able to say you owned one of North Dakota's principal buttes) serenaded us with his ukulele. But he redeemed himself with his grass-fed beef carpaccio, the best I have ever tasted. Thus refreshed (at least physically), we scrambled up to the summit, and sat in glorious silence to take in the improbable majesty of the broken country of the Great Plains.

It won't be a complete summer until I have spent an afternoon lying on a gravel bar in the Little Missouri River, with a bottle of water, a wedge of Cloverdale tangy summer sausage and a Triscuit, a cube of quality unsweetened chocolate, and a good book, preferably Walden. You read. You doze. You gaze around listlessly at the starkness of the badlands. You read a bit more and meditate on Thoreau's magical perceptions of the killer contradictions of American life. You doze. The parts of your body in the river are almost cold. The parts in the sun are almost toasted. Lonely hot badlands breezes waft over your bare shoulders to remind you of the strangeness and emptiness of the place. You make a Triscuit-summer sausage sandwich with a Swiss army knife reserved for these occasions. You lie down completely on the polished scoria and sandstone gravel, with some chips of smooth lignite mixed in, feet pointing downriver towards the Gulf of Mexico, arms outstretched first in the Da Vinci position and then close to your side, your head pointing directly upstream, parting the current of the river.

Paradise.

The sun slips behind one of the few clouds in the sky and the world goes gray and you involuntarily release a cool shiver. You pull yourself up on your elbows to inspect—a passing cloud A thunderstorm Is it evening already Does this day ever have to end

These moments are literally the happiest of my life, although in every superlative I ever utter there is a trump card, now 18 years old and beginning to think about heading back to college. She and I walked across the Little Missouri River a few weeks ago just outside of Medora. This river—alone among all the rivers of the world—has marked her short life. She was baptized in the Little Missouri when she was just a few months old, her father gripping the diaper, her mother having a nervous breakdown. I have carried her over to the other bank and back again on my shoulders a dozen times over the years. This was the first time she walked across on her own feet. We held hands hard, partly because that improves everybody's balance, partly because it was one of those perfect dad-daughter moments, and partly because she does not yet know how to read the river sufficiently to anticipate the moment when the firm bottom gives way to the gloppy shore mud that can suck you in to the knees, or worse, before you know what's happened.

As a frequent flyer I know I miss some lovely opportunities, but so far I have not had the joy of a massive and punishing thunderstorm this summer. I was, however, awakened last Saturday by one of the best experiences of ND life, a dawn thunderstorm followed by a sweet sustained rain shower. There is nothing quite like awakening at 4 a.m. to a crack of thunder, and then engaging in that foggy dawn internal debate about whether to hide under the covers and try to sleep through it, or get up and experience its full satisfaction.

Nor have I taken a thousand mile drive (coming); or canoed the White Cliffs of the Missouri (coming); or heard the croon of a coyote from inside a sleeping bag (coming); or counted meteorites on my back; or gotten lost on a two trail track in the badlands until the dust choked my nostrils and I looked nervously at the gas gauge. Life would be so much less without that.

With the arrival of August, I can hear the clock ticking, and as the evening begins to cool, I have found myself muttering lines from Shakespeare's Richard II I wasted time and now doth time waste me.

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Of Tawny Grass and the Medora Musical and a Perfect Summer Night

The solstice has come and gone. That always trips a little anxiety deep below the surface of my summer joy. We have reached peak light and now we are heading back into the darkness at the rate of three minutes per day. I spent that evening outside. It would be a crime against the light to be inside on 21 June. I don't know what your top five things about North Dakota are, but for me the lingering summer dusk is one of them. Sunset plus two hours of speechless serenity. Yellow followed by gold followed by pink followed by Bloody Mary red followed by charcoal and gray. Each color phase longer and subtler than the last. The pink sometimes wraps itself all the way around the horizon. Now station a thundercloud way, way off on the far western horizon intermittently pulsing with firefly light and you have paradise on earth.

When you sit out on a night like that, it is like a moment out of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam by the English poet Edward FitzGerald (1809-1883):

A Book of Verses underneath the Bough,
A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread-and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness-
O, Wilderness were Paradise enow!
To which I reply, Oh let the summer linger and the light.

On the Fourth of July I went to Medora with my daughter and my mother. My daughter is home in western Kansas for the summer. She is involved in 4-H for the last time as a competitor and she already feels the loss. Ask what is the most Jeffersonian thing in America and you will get a range of answers--from the exquisite Jefferson Building at the Library of Congress to the perfect cubic dining room at his retreat home Poplar Forest in Bedford County, VA. As far as I'm concerned, 4-H may be the epitome of Jefferson's vision of life rural kids learning principles of stewardship, humane care of livestock, household economics, craft, nutrition, rural teamwork, and responsible record-keeping, at the hands of enlightened community volunteers.

We sat through the Medora Fourth of July parade in mid-afternoon smirking, had supper in the hotel, and then went to the Medora Musical with Sheila Schafer, now enjoying her 49th consecutive summer in the badlands. Her health issues keep creeping up towards the tipping point, and she just keeps swatting them away with her perpetual youthfulness and lust for life. Her refrain seems to be, I'll let you know when I'm ready! I just want my daughter to be in the presence of such a woman, the most life-affirming person I have ever met. So there I was in the Burning Hills Amphitheater on a fabulous early July evening, with my three favorite women in the world my 18-year-old daughter, my 81-year-old mother, and the ageless Queen.

There were about 1,800 people in the crowd. The singing and the dancing are especially splendid this year. The prestidigitator Bill Sorensen (co-hosting) tells jokes so lame that we guffawed in spite of ourselves. My daughter laughed until she had tears in her eyes. And the principal co-host Emily Walter has such beauty, talent, and stage presence that in my opinion she deserves a much fuller portfolio, in Medora and beyond. Off in the distance Bullion Butte, and the sinuous thread of the sacred Little Missouri River.

The show was moving towards its close. The Burning Hills Singers had danced themselves out. The two North Dakota songs—Come Home to North Dakota, and Always North Dakota-- choked me up, as always, and sent a surge of raw North Dakota pride right into my heart. The finale this year is a beautifully understated patriotic medley. As it began, the most wonderful thing happened. Spontaneously, without cue cards or a barker or an MC, the large crowd just stood up to honor America, born 237 years ago in the pen of our most gifted dreamer Thomas Jefferson. It was everything you could want on the Fourth of July—just retro enough to clear out all the noise of modern life and make you believe again.

Afterwards, Sheila handed out hundreds of ice cream bars out behind her cabin tucked under the bluff at the edge of town, while one of the best fireworks displays I have ever seen cascaded down just over our outstretched heads. God Bless America.

On the way home the next day, near Almont, I noticed that the prairie grasses have begun to turn. After a late wet spring, the northern plains are beginning to take on their proper tan and russet look. The moment when the grass turns, mostly green and partly tawny, mostly tawny but still partly green, is my favorite moment of the summer in North Dakota. It's the paling and the graying of the green. That's when I think Ah, I live on the Great Plains of America.

This last Tuesday night I found myself at home alone with no pressing deadline. There had been a quick soaking thunderstorm about four p.m. so I could not work in my much-neglected garden without becoming a human mud ball. I made myself a little dinner of little leftovers and ate it in silence as I read the famous steeplechase scene in Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. All my electronics were in the off position, as they say on commercial aircraft. The house was perfectly quiet. I took my book and a glass of cold white wine out onto the deck.

The temperature was perfect, precisely what I would have dialed up if I had a hotline to the great god of meteorology. It was not hot. It was warm and, depending on how the breeze stirred, sometimes a little cool and sometimes a little toasty, but toasty in just the right way. No wind, just a gentle breeze that came and went without any drama, like the steady even breathing of the continent. If it had been ten degrees hotter or the breeze three miles per hour stronger, it would have been just one of those North Dakota summer evenings with a summer wind. That would be just fine, but I would not have lingered outside. But this was an evening so perfect in every way that it made me forget that there is winter on the northern plains. About an hour into my reverie, I remember thinking, If I died at dusk tonight (rather than go in to fetch a jacket), I'd be wholly content. The Oglala warrior Crazy Horse used to ride off to battle saying, Le anpetu kin mat'e kin waste ktelo, it is a good day to die. That's how I felt Tuesday night, though I am quite happy to be alive and (reverie or no reverie) there are, fortunately, dozens of projects that must be completed before I let myself croak. Still, that feeling that this is what human happiness is, there is nothing that is missing, was exquisite. I miss my daughter sorely, but if she had been with me we'd be chattering and laughing, not drinking in the gentle breeze in a silence so powerful that you hear it, if that makes any sense.

I just lay there just taking in the evening like a human zucchini, letting thoughts drift in and out of my mind the way you see those motes in your eye drift around slowly and disappear. Somewhere in the distance a mother called out lovingly for her children to come in now for the night.

Happiness at its core is such a simple thing.

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Old Ruts and New Beginnings at the 40th High School Reunion

Last weekend my high school class gathered for our 40th class reunion. Bleck. The class of 1973 at Dickinson High School once numbered just under 200. According to the count of our informal class historian, ten of us have died so far. (The clock has started to matter). But only about 45 of us turned up for the reunion. The usual suspects. Where the other 150 graduates were I have no idea. Perhaps they thought it would be impossible to find rooms in the new Dickinson of the Bakken era.

We followed the time worn pattern. Reception Friday night with homemade hors d'oeuvres, made by the same cluster of women who have done all the work at every function since we were in first grade. The Rough Riders Roundup parade on Saturday morning. And then a banquet in the appropriately named Sodbusters Room at the Elks Club on Saturday night. Plenty of drinking. Lots of catch-up talk. Really You joined the Peace Corps Why didn't I know that How did you like Upper Volta So this is your fourth wife Well, she's really very lovely. So prison's not so bad, huh Or my favorite You've lived in Dickinson all this time I've never run into you in 40 years!

The most amazing thing about a high school class reunion is that everything is different and yet everything is also frozen in time. Some of the kids from the wrong side of the tracks have prospered in amazing ways, pulled themselves up by their bootstraps, and done remarkable and important things in the world. It's thrilling to hear their stories. It makes you believe in the American dream again. And yet the moment they enter that room, they walk through a portal back in time to 1972, when George McGovern made his quixotic run for the presidency against Richard Milhous Nixon, and the Watergate break-in touched off one of the most fascinating political crises in American history. Suddenly we are all thrust back into a small town class system that is surprisingly tenacious (and vicious). Social cliques that have been unfed for forty full years suddenly reassert themselves, and everyone is immediately made aware that the popular elite continue to regard themselves as a breed apart and above. For the most part everyone accepts their allotted place on the great chain of being. We're like dairy cattle suddenly let into the barn we all waddle right back to our old assigned stanchions.

Ancient grudges catch fire like an ember long buried in a heap of ash that suddenly gets a whiff of oxygen. Ancient unrequited romantic longings play themselves out as if someone pushed the eight-track tape back into the slot right where it left off at that famous spin the bottle party in 1969. People stand around gossiping about who has a crush on whom, and who won't accept that Brent doesn't fancy her and never will. The incident at the state basketball tournament is hotly debated as if it occurred a week ago Thursday rather than 42 long years ago, at the other end of our lives. It's as if we are all helpless to emancipate ourselves from our primal roles. Actually, I think we secretly like the old stew of adolescent angst.

We could not have been more pathetic in the big Saturday morning parade. Almost everyone turned up late, as if to a float-decorating session on the weekend before homecoming. Some of us had to be hoisted up onto the flatbed with a crane. Most folks brought deck chairs, and the usual women brought extra chairs for the ones who forgot to bring them, just as they forgot to bring a pencil to math, or a note from their parents before the bus trip to Williston. We were Float 139 or something, so far back that the lead vehicles virtually lapped us before we moved at all. If there had been a lamest entry in the parade we would have won hands down. The parade, in fact, was essentially an elongated trade fair for the Bakken Oil Boom featuring gigantic rigs of mysterious purpose that lumbered through the streets of west Dickinson like a stray herd of Triceratops. We (of '73) just sat there on those deck chairs, all spread out to appear to be numerous. It felt more like the outdoor deck of a nursing home after supper than a class of young men and women that once looked upon the world as their oyster. Nobody cheered us. I studied the crowds along the street. They were looking at us with the same disbelief we once reserved for the Class of 1947 To this fate I will never come. I will never be that old. And this is just the 40th. Ten years from now we'll need an array of oxygen valves.

We all gathered more or less on time for the big banquet at the Elks. It was just like old times my date stood me up, even though she had invited me to the event more than a year ago. I gave the after dinner talk, because RB, our class president, didn't show up again. He has been specially invited to each of our four reunions. On several of those occasions he has agreed to come—and speak—and each time he has failed to turn up. At which point the organizers have tended to turn (in dismay) to me, the junior runner up.

I told two stories, one about adolescent love and one about mature love. The first story was about a girl named Linda Kokko with whom I was helplessly in love in eighth grade. It took me eleven movies at the one-screen downtown movie theater to work up the courage to hold her hand (about the time the credits began to roll), and then—on a perfect winter night at the skating rink over by the college—I somehow stumbled over the threshold and had my first kiss. She moved to Billings shortly thereafter (so far as I know, unrelated). As a farewell gift I bought her a birthstone ring at Britton Jewelers for $2.45. When my father—a decidedly hands off father—found out about it he came in my room one evening and closed the door. (Trouble ahead!). He asked me to confirm the story that Miss Kokko was leaving the territory and that I had spent all of my available capital on a birthstone ring. Through crimson blushing I confirmed the word on the street. At which point he gave me virtually the only advice he ever offered: 'Son, never buy oats for a dead horse.'

Well, I have been buying oats for dead horses all of my life, no letup in sight.

But then I told the story of my mother, now 81, who attended her 50th college reunion in Moorhead ten years ago. My father had been dead for eight years at that point and mother had sworn off any possibility of second romance. She ran into a boy she had dated a couple of times in college. Back then—the cad--he had sent her a Dear John letter, which—in her sweet Germanic way--she still has, and has thrown in his face from time to time. They rekindled their romance at their 50th class reunion. They are still an item, very much in love, and mother is, I believe, happier than she has ever been.

I've adjusted to this amazing occurrence with my usual evenness of temper. My shrink says I should stop wetting the bed sometime late next year.

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The Bakken Oil Boom from the Back of an Open Airplane

Last week I wrote about a whimsical airplane journey I took a couple of weeks ago with a North Dakotan who is a key player in the Bakken Oil Boom. We flew in a small funky yellow two-seat plane from Bismarck to Bullion Butte, then down the Little Missouri River to Watford City, and then overland back to Bismarck by way of Zap and Golden Valley. It was a nine-hour adventure with someone of infinite good humor, who boomed and busted in the oil boom the last time around, in the 1980s, then stuck it out through all the lean years when all the summer soldiers and sunshine patriots sought their windfalls elsewhere. I have the deepest respect for what he represents—a homegrown North Dakotan with persistence and superb instincts that have now finally paid off in a big, big way.

Last week I wrote about our adventure. Today I want to try to make sense of what I saw as we flew over the green grassy plains of North Dakota in a wet June.

In every crisis of life, no matter how big or small, it is essential to try to step back and view things from a broader perspective. It really is true that we cannot see the forest for the trees. That's a cliché, but if you try to look at a big phenomenon from too close to the ground (or ground zero), you see only what is immediately before you, not the larger pattern of things. If, for example, you are a Wall Street Journal reporter or someone from the BBC, and you fly out from New York or London to Denver and then on a tiny plane to Williston, ND, to make sense of the oil boom, you are going to see a city bursting with energy, enterprise, dust, chaos, congestion, noise, construction, and growing pains that make it not a very attractive destination. But Williston is not the oil boom and the oil boom is not Williston. Williston is one of the choke points of the oil boom.

The oil boom is many things that cannot be seen from the air. Full employment. The promise of energy independence for America. A whopping state budget surplus and what is tending towards full funding for a wide range of institutions and enterprises that have been living on thin gruel for most of North Dakota history. Jobs aplenty. New life in small towns. One of my closest friends is a faux-curmudgeonly former newspaper editor from Crosby. We had a long conversation in the heart of the badlands a few weeks ago and he said this. I have lived in Crosby, ND, all of my life. What you have to understand is that for almost all of my life we have been managing decline and depopulation, economic marginality, and loss. Do you know what that is like for a town to go through We have had hundreds of meetings over the years about how to find a way to save and regenerate our little hometown. Nothing really worked. Suddenly, thanks to the Bakken, we are viable again, and growing. There are shops on mainstreet and every house in town is full of families or workers. Heck, we even have a housing boom in Crosby. We wish the growth were a little less and a little slower, a little more organic, of course, but do you think we can really wish this hadn't happened

Towns like Williston, Watford City, Killdeer are just scrambling to survive this tsunami, and keep life livable for both long-term residents and newcomers. They are currently fracked communities as well as fracking communities. But other towns as far away as Bottineau, Harvey, Bowman, Spearfish, Kenmare, (etc.) are experiencing indirect regeneration from the Bakken phenomenon. They may be the biggest winners. A moderate amount of new life and economic activity makes all the difference in a rural community like that. Faraway Grand Forks is reaping benefits thanks to extremely intelligent strategic planning, and Bismarck is a becoming a new place. Just walk around downtown for a couple of hours and remember what that experience was like even as few as six years ago. Last week I told a visiting capitalist from Chicago that Bismarck is going to be the Tulsa of the Bakken Oil Boom. He laughed hard and said dream higher. Which means that he doesn't understand the history of the Great Plains at all.

Here's what you see if you spend ample time flying over the western half of North Dakota merely trying to drink in what you can observe from a couple of thousand feet. First, there is an awful lot of North Dakota. Even now, in the midst of this industrial juggernaut that is plunking down oil wells at the rate of approximately 2000 per year, there are, as a famous writer put it, more places where nothing is than something is. North Dakota (and the larger Great Plains of which it is a small rectangle) is still a vast and open landscape that is, after 150 years of white settlement and economic activity, largely empty in every direction.

Second, the development is only initially gross and transgressive. But once the pump jacks are installed and the pipelines are buried and the water and fracking trucks move on, the landscape gets pretty calm again. From the air it is not ugly. To my mind the boom does violate one of the things I most love about western North Dakota—its essential primordialness—but from a couple of thousand feet the footprint is not nearly as overpowering as it seems from the junction of US 85 and US 2. Or from a bench in the city park in Alexander, the home of one of my heroes Arthur A. Link, the man who reminded us that there are values in the North Dakota character greater than money-making. The choke points are really choked.

Third, the badlands are indeed punctuated in every direction with oil activity. I find that disheartening, as does my oil-soaked pilot-friend, but the badlands are still the badlands and they are astonishingly beautiful and largely untouched, even with a buff-colored tank array here and a drilling rig there. If we adopt some special protocols and restraints for badlands development, especially on federal and state lands, we can probably make the oil boom respect this sacred corridor carved by wind and the Little Missouri River, and at least minimize (ok, moderate) the impact somewhat. I do worry what will happen when all those 10-year development leases start to come due, but there is still time to save a few of the finest parcels. In fact, there is still time to create the modest Prairie Legacy Wilderness of about 65,000 acres, to set aside a wee little sliver of the few remaining pristine acreages. We should save these parcels for seed.

No matter what happens, there is still going to be a vast amount of North Dakota that wears, and will always wear, an exceedingly light industrial footprint. We are going to have to discover parts and places of North Dakota outside of the prime recreation zone. We are going to have to take our spirit recreations in landscapes we have hitherto largely ignored. We are going to have to come to terms with loss.

And we the people are going to have to fight to chasten this thing in some important ways. Because our leadership is so far not doing much chastening.

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David Barton: The Jefferson Lies

David Barton's new book, The Jefferson Lies: Exposing the Myths You've Always Believed About Thomas Jefferson, is not as bad as it is being made out to be. It has very serious problems—special pleading, fundamental errors of omission, a willful misunderstanding and deliberate distortion of Jefferson's basic religious outlook, demonization of those who see Jefferson as a deist and freethinker, and the frequent use of the straw man fallacy. But Barton is right in one key respect: Thomas Jefferson was less thoroughly secular than some advocates of separation of church and state have claimed. He did not seek to remove all religious expression from the public square. Nor did he conceive the University of Virginia as an unambiguously secular institution of higher learning. For this reason, though Barton's book is not likely to win praise in any but conservative and evangelical circles, it does a service to our national conversation about the place of religion in American public life, and the debate it is generating may help to clarify both Jefferson's personal religious views and his talismanic phrase, "wall of separation between church and state."

The basic problem of Barton's book is that he approaches Jefferson not as a scholar or historian, but as an evangelical Christian propagandist and casuist with a preconceived result in mind. His life mission is to prove the Founding Fathers intended America to be a Christian nation. For many years he has combed through the lives and letters of America's founders to find whatever they wrote that appears to reinforce his fixed idea. As long as you don't have a scrupulous sense of scholarly fairness or integrity, this can be a fruitful business. Many of the founders were serious and pious Christians. Most of the Founders said things at one time or another that, taken out of the larger context of their works, appear to endorse Barton's thesis. Some of the Founding Fathers, Jefferson and John Adams, for example, wrestled with their religious sensibilities and belief systems, and though they found many things to fault in the Christianity they inherited as children of the Enlightenment, they never made a crisp break with the Christian tradition. He who wants to comb out of the founding era statements that appear to substantiate the idea that America was intended to be a Christian nation, or that the founders themselves were good Christians, will find plenty of fodder, providing his readers do not check his references or examine the larger body of material relating to this important subject.

I agree with theologian and historian of religion Martin Marty of the University of Chicago: "If you wanted to promote the idea of 'a Christian America,' one which would privilege one religion, a version of Christianity, and de-privilege all others, and if you want to get back to roots and origins, the last of the "founding fathers" on whom you'd concentrate would be Jefferson." Many of the founders were more or less traditional Christians. Jefferson was not. If your mission is to "prove" that the founders intended a Christian nation, why not turn to Patrick Henry, Alexander Hamilton, Manasseh Cutler, Benjamin Rush, or George Washington? Why try to twist a Christian Jefferson out of the large mass of anti-clerical, skeptical, deistic, anti-Trinitarian, and demystifying material that Jefferson wrote in the course of a lifetime?

Why take on a man who advised his nephew to "Question with boldness even the existence of a God," who said that the Bible should be read with the same scholarly detachment one uses with the works of Livy or Tacitus, who wrote in bemusement that "I am of a sect by myself, as far as I know"? In other words, why not let Jefferson be Jefferson? With the possible exception of Thomas Paine, Jefferson is the last of the founders one would want to try to twist into orthodox Christianity.

Jefferson's actual religious outlook is perfectly encapsulated by Eugene R. Sheridan in the monograph Jefferson and Religion he wrote for the Monticello Monograph Series in 1998. After concluding that Jefferson was "not a systematic religious thinker," in other words, that Jefferson did not develop a final, logically consistent, religious perspective that satisfactorily answered the many religious questions he wrestled with in the course of his long and otherwise busy life, Sheridan writes, "an analysis of the elements of his Christian faith reveals that there was both more to it than those who emphasize his rationalism have conceded and less than those who stress his religiousness have admitted." [64] Aside from his deliberate distortions and omissions, Barton stakes out the ground in Jefferson's writings and actions where there was "more to it [evidence of a spiritual life] than those who emphasize his rationalism have conceded." By concentrating on the writings and actions of Jefferson that can be seen as traditionally Christian in some sense of that term, to the exclusion of the mass of materials that contradict that notion, Barton, at least to his own satisfaction and that of the legion of evangelical hopefuls he writes to please, rescues "the Christian Jefferson" from the secular box into which he has been thrust by liberal academics who, he says, prefer ideology to truth. But historian Paul Conkin is emphatic, "Nothing in any of his writings suggest that he really believed that Jesus was the Messiah, or that God so intervened in human history as to appoint special agents to effect salvation, or that the Bible was inspired, or that Jesus rose from the dead." [34] This would seem to cut the ground out from under Barton's project. Even Joseph Priestley, the father of the Unitarian church, died doubting that Jefferson could be called a Christian, even by the bare-bones definition he had established.

Sheridan sees Jefferson as "demythologized Christian—as one, that is to say, who rejected all myth, all mystery, all miracles, and almost all supernaturalism in religion." [65] Here again, it is in the narrow zone left open by "almost all supernaturalism" that Barton stakes his evangelical tent. This would seem to be taking Jefferson out of context in an extreme way. The stakes are high. Barton is not really trying to make sense of Thomas Jefferson; he is attempting to undermine the authority of the greatest freethinker among the Founding Fathers, and he is using Jefferson to try to break down the wall of separation between church and state. The Jefferson Lies is an important contribution to the culture wars of our time, not because it represents a valid analysis of Jefferson's religious views, but because it makes claims that millions of Americans believe or want to believe. Even so, no one should mistake The Jefferson Lies for careful or thoughtful history.

A well-known letter to Benjamin Rush perfectly illustrates Barton's method. Jefferson wrote, "I am a Christian, in the only sense in which he wished any one to be; sincerely attached to his doctrines, in preference to all others; ascribing to himself every human excellence, and believing he never claimed any other." When Barton reads this passage he fixates on the word "Christian." Jefferson tells a fellow signer of the Declaration of Independence that "I am a Christian." When any fair-minded reader sees this passage s/he focuses on the phrases, "attached to his doctrines," "every human excellence," and "never claiming any other." In other words, what Jefferson is actually saying to Rush is something like the following. "I'm more of a 'Christian' than the so-called 'Christians,' because I understand, as they don't, that Jesus was only a man, albeit a very great ethical teacher, and I subscribe to his teachings rather than the aura of divinity that has been imposed on him. Nor do I think Jesus himself believed himself the son of God or a member of the Trinity. Since this is what is truly meant by 'Christian,' I can more justly call myself a 'Christian' than the irrationalists who believe things that a rational being must reject." Barton regards Jefferson's letter to Rush as a confession of Christianity; but what Jefferson meant was that he was an admirer of Jesus the man and ethical reformer, and that he resented that so-called "Christians" had hijacked the man and his message. In a late letter Jefferson distinguished the kind of Christianity he wished to promote (rational, demystified, simple, natural) from the Platonized, encrusted thing he now called "nicknamed Christianity."

Jefferson's letter to Rush is more a political than a theological document. As Paul Conkin puts it, "In the charged political context of 1800, his 'conversion' to Unitarianism served a wonderful role. It allowed him to affirm his own allegiance to the earliest, purest, and simplest form of Christianity, and to dismiss his purportedly orthodox opponents as deceived purveyors of a corrupted, paganized, Platonized religion that they incorrectly identified with the teachings of Jesus." [30]

Jefferson made the same point with more candor in a letter to John Adams. There, he declared, "I am a real Christian, that is to say, a disciple of the doctrines of Jesus, very different from the Platonists, who call me infidel, and themselves Christians and preachers of the gospel, while they draw all their characteristic dogmas from what it's Author never said or saw." Again, the real Christian is an admirer of the historical Jesus and his ministry; the misguided "Christians" are those who accept the mystical, irrational, and miraculous tradition of the Trinity, the virgin birth, the miracles, and the resurrection. Jefferson is attempting to distinguish the Christians, properly understood from the so-called Christians.

On another occasion, Jefferson wrote: "Our saviour did not come into the world to save metaphysicians only. His doctrines are leveled to the simplest understanding and it is only by banishing Hierophantic mysteries and Scholastic subtleties, which they have nick-named Christianity, and getting back to the plain and unsophisticated precepts of Christ, that we become real Christians." Barton does not cite this letter to Salma Hale, written on July 26, 1818.

Jefferson's religious views were never fixed in stone. His outlook changed and evolved in the course of his 83-year life. But there are a few constants in his thinking that would seem to make him the least likely Founding Father for Barton's evangelical purposes. Jefferson did not believe in the divinity of Christ. Jefferson rejected the Trinity as a non-Biblical resurgence of polytheism. Jefferson believed in God, but he rejected the portrait of God in all of the Old Testament and much of the New Testament. By the end of his college years, according to historian Paul Conkin, "he had rejected all of what he now saw as the mysterious and supernatural components of Christianity, or in brief, the whole Pauline scheme of salvation." [22] Jefferson was a deist. Jefferson rejected the New Testament until he found a way to "rescue" the historical Jesus and his authentic sayings from the mass of apocalyptical, miraculous, and mystical material in which the life and sayings of Jesus had been buried. Jefferson rejected the Pauline epistles outright. Jefferson dismissed the book of Revelation as "the ravings of a maniac." Jefferson rejected the resurrection of the body, including the resurrection of the body of Jesus. Jefferson had a huge anti-clerical streak, and wrote sharply critical statements about the ways in which institutional Christianity had enslaved mankind and intruded on the rights of man. In the first draft of his famous letter to the Danbury Baptists, Jefferson had called not just for "a wall of separation between church and state," but for "a wall of eternal separation between church and state."

Barton begins his book with a long—and fundamentally erroneous—roster of evangelical Christianity's secularist enemies: deconstructionists, poststructuralists, modernists, minimalists, and academic collectivists. This part of the book is actually just embarrassing. Barton reduces these important schools of social and literary criticism to the crudest caricatures. Historians Warren Throckmorton and Michael Coulter gently conclude that "Barton uses these terms in ways that are peculiar at best and generally misrepresent what the general practices employed in the academic study of history." Barton seems to think the basis of deconstruction is cultural destruction and modernism looking at everything from a presentist perspective. Barton's strategy seems to be to offend serious academics right from the start, so that he can claim later, in rebuttals and on media talk shows, that such serious intellectuals, in condemning his puerilities and deliberate distortions, are merely proving his point: that they are hostile to God and the Founders' vision of a Christian nation. It's a perfect straw man strategy. Anyone who criticizes Barton's book is one of these bogeymen, who fault his book not because it is historically inaccurate, but because they are, as usual, promoting their liberal progressive atheist and secularist agenda. Throughout his book Barton wages war against secularists who don't really exist, members of "all five groups of historical malpractice," mendacious men and women who practice the evils of peer review. He argues that the liberal academic community regards Jefferson as an atheist (not true), as a statesman who sought ruthlessly to cleanse the public square of religious expression (not true), a man who hated all pastors, ministers, and priests (decidedly not true), a bold and indecorous man who cheerfully edited the Bible (not true), a book which he "hated" (not true).

But wait. There are three serious books on Jefferson and religion. The first of these is Charles B. Sanford's The Religious Life of Thomas Jefferson (1984). So far from being a secularist-progressive study of Jefferson's religious life, Sanford emphasized those parts of Jefferson's achievement least antagonistic to traditional Christianity, and tried to normalize Jefferson's religious views perhaps more than the historical records supports. Edwin Scott Gaustad was the author of Sworn Upon the Altar of God: A Religious Biography of Thomas Jefferson (1994). Gaustad (1923-2011) was a professor of history at the University of California, Riverside. The author of several highly acclaimed books, Gaustad was also president of the American Society of Church History. Nobody ever called him a deconstructionist or an academic collectivist. Eugene Sheridan's Jefferson and Religion was published as part of the Monticello Monograph Series in 1998. Sheridan, a distinguished editor and historian, first published the essay as the introduction to Princeton University's Jefferson's Extracts from the Gospels: "The Philosophy of Jesus" and "The Life and Morals of Jesus." None of these extraordinary historians was a poststructuralist or minimalist, none a leftist or a determined secularist. Each of these books is a thoughtful study of Jefferson's religious life. None tries to argue that Jefferson was a traditional Christian. All agree that Jefferson was a deist who denied the divinity of Christ and argued that Jesus was a great moral leader and Jewish reformist. Since Barton makes no attempt to "place" his own book in the stream of Jefferson scholarship represented by these books, it must be that he either disagrees with the analyses of Sanford, Sheridan, and Gaustad, or that he regards them as vile secularists who are working to distort the truth about the religious lives and intentions of the Founding Fathers. And yet all three of these books are infinitely more reliable studies of Jefferson's religious views than The Jefferson Lies.

To prove that Jefferson was a traditional Christian, and certainly not antagonistic to traditional Christianity, Barton engages in a steady stream of distortions, misrepresentations, spurious claims, overstatements, over-simplifications, and wrenchings of material out of context. Here are a just a couple of examples.

Barton claims that Jefferson "personally helped finance the printing of one of America's groundbreaking editions of the Bible." [68] This is more than a little misleading. Like hundreds of others, Jefferson subscribed to [i.e., pre-ordered] that two-volume Bible, just as he subscribed to many other books in the course of his lifetime. Funding the publication of certain books by way of subscription was a common practice in the eighteenth century. For example, Samuel Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language (1755) was pre-ordered by subscription, as well as Meriwether Lewis's never completed multi-volume report on his 1804-1806 exploration of the American West.

Barton makes much of the fact that Jefferson owned a number of Bibles. The third president also owned a Koran, a fact never mentioned by Barton. That copy of the Koran, now in the collection of the Library of Congress, was recently used by Minnesota Congressman-elect Keith Ellison, a Muslim-American, when he took the oath of office in the United States Capitol. Of course Jefferson owned Bibles. He was fully aware that the Bible is one of the handful of foundation texts of western civilization, the source text for countless works of literature in all the languages he read, frequently invoked (then more than now) in books of every sort on every subject. Bibles were essential texts in the library of any intellectually awake individual. Owning multiple copies had more to do with the variety of translations and the Bible's publication in all the languages of the world, including in Algonquian and Nattick. The Bible was also the primary source of information about the person Jefferson regarded as the greatest man who ever lived, Jesus of Nazareth. It would have been more remarkable if Jefferson did not own multiple copies of the Bible. Owning Bibles did not make Jefferson a traditional Christian, any more than owning the Koran made him a Muslim.

It is not at all clear how Barton comes to the conclusion that "It is clear that none of Jefferson's personal writings from any period of his life reveal anything less than his strong conviction in a personal God Who answers prayers and intervenes in the affairs of mankind and before Whom every individual would stand to be judged." [191] The evidence actually points to Jefferson's rational belief in a clockmaker God who has a general providential plan for humanity, and who may possibly intervene in human affairs when mankind strays disastrously from principles of justice and fair play. If Jefferson's letters are an accurate indication, he sometimes prayed, though his statement to his closest friend James Madison that Patrick Henry was so obstructionist to the reformation of Virginia that "What we have to do I think is devoutly to pray for his death" would seem to be of a rhetorical nature, not a literal injunction.

For Barton to declare that "Jefferson also was definitely not a deist," is just nonsense. It might be accurately argued that while Jefferson was certainly a deist, he was at times an inconsistent one, who posited a God who might under certain circumstances judge mankind for his violations of natural rights. It is possible to find in Jefferson's voluminous writings echoes of the doctrines of Heaven and Hell and divine judgment, particularly when he wanted to call attention to evils so egregious as the continuation of slavery. But the general tenor of Jefferson's outlook is thoroughly deistic. Gaustad, Sanford, and Sheridan all unhesitatingly conclude that he was a deist, though Sanford makes room for a streak of theism in Jefferson's writings, too.

That Jefferson was a deist would seem to be irrefutable. I know of no serious scholar who doubts that proposition. To John Adams in 1823, Jefferson wrote what amounts to a quintessential articulation of deism:

"The movements of the heavenly bodies, so exactly held in their course by the balance of centrifugal and centripetal forces, the structure of the earth itself, with it's distribution of lands, waters, and atmosphere, animal and vegetable bodies, examined in all their minutest particles, insects mere atoms of life, yet as perfectly organised as man or mammoth, the mineral substances, their generation and uses, it is impossible, I say, for the human mind not to believe that there is, in all this, design, cause, and effect, up to an ultimate cause, a fabricator of all things from matter and motion. . . ."

If this isn't deism, what is? Jefferson's letter to Adams is so perfectly crafted that it is widely regarded as one of the best short descriptions of deism ever written. In another letter Jefferson wrote of "evident proofs of the necessity of a superintending power to maintain the universe in its course and order."

Nowhere in his book does Barton quote Jefferson's most famous and most controversial statement about religion. In Notes on the State of Virginia Jefferson unguardedly but candidly wrote, "But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg." As genuine scholars of Jefferson's religious life have shown, this statement, written ca. 1782 and first printed in 1785, came back to haunt Jefferson for the rest of his life, particularly when he stood for the presidency in 1800 and 1804. Just as his cousin John Marshall said "The morals of the author of the letter to Mazzei cannot be pure," so too Jefferson's critics believed that a man who could write so glibly about a matter not only of civic importance but salvation, too, was not fit to hold public office. It was not just the meaning of this famous sentence that offended Christian conservatives, in Jefferson's time and beyond. The irreverent and even cynical tone of the statement, its confidence and its unmistakable dismissiveness of theological questions that had wracked Christendom for almost two thousand years, appalled genuine believers.

It would seem obvious that no serious examination of Jefferson's religious life can ignore that pivotal statement in the book where Jefferson offered his freest expression of his core philosophy. And yet Barton never refers to the statement in any way. In the same chapter of Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson makes an equally provocative statement about orthodoxy and heresy: "Millions of innocent men, women and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined and imprisoned; yet we have not advanced one inch towards uniformity." Barton neither quotes the passage nor makes an attempt to absorb it into his argument that Jefferson was a traditional Christian.

The Jefferson Bible

Barton's analysis of "the Jefferson Bible" is fundamentally unsatisfactory. He is quite right that there are two key documents in question, The Philosophy of Jesus that President Jefferson compiled in 1804, and The Life and Morals of Jesus that Jefferson compiled late in his retirement at Monticello. Barton rightly emphasizes that neither was intended for publication. In fact, Jefferson was so private in his religious musings, and so frightened that these highly personal and potentially explosive documents might fall into the wrong hands, so worried that they would somehow find their way into print under his name, and bring the Tower of Siloam down upon his head, that he shared them with only a tiny handful of friends and cabinet members, and then only on the condition that these trusted correspondents return the manuscripts without copying them out or showing them to others. Even Jefferson's family members were unaware of these projects until will after his death in 1826.

What many scholars incorrectly call "The Jefferson Bible"—a title Jefferson never himself used, which wrongly gives these private projects a more authoritative and combative feel than they actually intended—amounts to little more than one man of the Enlightenment's search for the historical Jesus in the four gospels of the New Testament, and Jefferson's attempts to separate what he regarded as the authentic sayings of Jesus from spurious sayings wrongly attributed to Jesus. Barton is right to insist, "Neither was a 'Bible,' and Jefferson would have strenuously objected to that characterization." [70] As Gaustad says, "The retired president did not produce his small book to shock or offend a somnolent world; he composed it for himself, for his devotion, for his assurance, for a more restful sleep at nights and a more confident greeting of the mornings." [131]

As a young man, Jefferson found so much to object to in the Bible that he essentially rejected it altogether, along the lines laid down by Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke (1678-1751), whose writings Jefferson devoured, and excerpts of which came to dominate his Commonplace Book. Bolingbroke not only exposed all the irrationalities, vulgarisms, brutalities, miracles, and inconsistencies in the Bible (particularly the Old Testament), but wondered why the one true God would choose to introduce himself to mankind by way of a tiny, xenophobic, and inward-looking near eastern tribe. Jefferson's own skepticism, buttressed by Bolingbroke's severe criticism of the irrationalities of the Christian tradition, might have turned the future president away from the Christian tradition altogether and once and for all. As Paul Conkin puts it, "In a period stretching from the early 1790s until he time he became president, he discovered a minimalist, Unitarian version of Christianity, most of whose tenets he could affirm." [21] After meeting the English chemist and Unitarian Joseph in 1797 and reading Priestley's History of the Corruptions of Christianity a number of times, Jefferson returned to the Bible to see if he could save the book (and Christianity) for himself by removing from it the encrustations that had clouded its simple message. Sheridan writes, "the implied message of the 'Syllabus' [the letter that preceded the Bible project] was that Christianity could only be made acceptable to rational men by purging it of its corruptions and restoring the doctrines of Jesus to their pristine simplicity." In pressing for a demystified biography of Jesus, Jefferson, in a letter to Francis Adrian Van der Kemp, spoke of the need for a "mortal biography of Jesus."

Like his friend Joseph Priestley, Jefferson rejected what he regarded as the corruptions of Christianity. He believed that the simple teachings of Jesus had been buried in doctrine, dogma, liturgy, ritual, church hierarchies, and deliberate distortions at the hands of men like Paul and the church fathers. In his own compilation, Jefferson rejected the "immaculate conception of Jesus, his deification, the creation of the world by him [Jesus], his miraculous powers, his resurrection and visible ascension, his corporeal presence in the Eucharist, the Trinity, original sin, atonement, regeneration, election, orders of hierarchy, &c." These, Jefferson said, were "artificial systems, invented by Ultra-Christian sects, unauthorised by any single word ever uttered by [Jesus]." Says Sheridan, "he was firmly convinced that they had been deliberately fabricated by the clergy to render lay people dependent upon them and thereby increase their wealth and power." [68]

So far so good. Barton's attempt to correct this conventional understanding of "the Jefferson Bible" requires him to argue that the books were not as severely secular and demystified as they have been universally said to be. Barton insists that Jefferson included in his New Testament scrapbooks many passages that contain "acts of a miraculous or supernatural character," that "the Jefferson Bible" contains passages on the "resurrection of the dead," and "mentions of the Divine, the miraculous, Heaven, Hell, and other supernatural elements." [80] There are three things to say about this. First, though the clear purpose of "the Jefferson Bible" was to extract from the New Testament a non-divine biography of Jesus and a collection of his parables and ethical sayings rather than those that point to questions of apocalypse, judgment, atonement, resurrection, and metaphysics, Jefferson did not engage in a perfectly consistent or ruthless cleansing of the gospels. As Gaustad suggests, if Thomas Paine's mission in his controversial book The Age of Reason had been "to see how much [in the bible] he could destroy; Jefferson wanted to see how much he could preserve." [131] If only to insure that the resulting account had Aristotelian integrity—a intelligible biographical narrative with logical continuity and a beginning, middle, and end—Jefferson retained a number of passages that might be questioned by a pure rationalist or pure secularist. The result was on the whole successful even though a few non-rational passages were retained. Gaustad concludes, "Even when this took some rather careful cutting with scissors or razor, Jefferson managed to maintain Jesus' role as a great moral teacher, not as a shaman or faith healer." [129]

Second, Jefferson retained a few passages in which Jesus pronounces that he was the divine Son of God, not because Jefferson believed them, but because he believed that it was quite likely that Jesus believed them, at least in the last days of his ministry. In some moods over the course of his lifetime, Jefferson insisted that Jesus never claimed divinity, and in others he acknowledged that Jesus might have deluded himself (to use Jefferson's actual term) into believing in his divinity as he became a kind of Jesus Christ superstar in the days before his fatal journey into Jerusalem. Statements can be extracted from Jefferson's letters that articulate both views. The important thing to remember is that Jefferson himself never once wrote anything that suggested that believed in the divinity of Jesus. For Jefferson, Jesus was the greatest man who ever lived. In keeping several of Jesus' sayings that indicated that the Jewish rabbi had come to think of himself as the Son of God, Jefferson was preserving the historical biography of Jesus to the best of his abilities, fascinated perhaps by the workings of charisma, the dynamics of Jesus speaking to rapt mass audiences, and those masses in turn feeding his sense of his unique powers.

Third, Jefferson was not an unwavering rationalist. There was a strong sentimentalist and romantic streak in Jefferson, brilliantly analyzed in Andrew Burstein's important book The Inner Jefferson: Portrait of a Grieving Rationalist (1996). Perhaps because he had buried his favorite sister, his best friend, his beloved wife Martha, four (eventually five) of his six children, Jefferson retained in his Jesus biographies four healings, in Charles Stanford's words, "all acts of healing that showed Jesus' compassion and could be explained by natural causes." [112] The consensus of all previous Jefferson scholars has been that while Jefferson broke his own secularist paradigm by including these four instances of healing, the Sage of Monticello may perhaps be forgiven for retaining these lesser "miracles" as a way of soothing his own sense of loss. As he wrote to Maria Cosway in 1787, "I am born to lose everything I love." In his Bible projects Jefferson's heart triumphed over his head, as it not infrequently did in the course of his long life. Conkin concludes, "He was a creature of mood and sentiment much more than a rigorous thinker." [35] For Barton to seize upon these and a few other not-strictly-secular passages and then to conclude that Jefferson was a Christian after all, is a deliberate perversion of the truth and an invasion of Jefferson's deepest private space merely for the purposes of religious propaganda. Barton's thesis—that Jefferson is at the very least not so secular in his Bible project as he has been made to seem—is effectively refuted by the way in which "the Jefferson Bible" ends. Barton makes much of what can be seen to have been retained, but Gaustad is surely more accurate in saying, "the omissions [are] even more revealing than the inclusions." [124] As Sanford says, "Jefferson included a full account of the trial and crucifixion of Christ but ended with the burial and omitted all of the resurrection and ascension accounts." [114] This would appear to be irrefutable. Without the resurrection and transfiguration, in what sense can Jesus of Nazareth be said to be the Christ?

Barton makes much of the fact that Jefferson's "Bible" is not 100% free of divinity, and implies that this makes Jefferson a Christian. But Eugene Sheridan has a more accurate explanation. According to Sheridan, Jefferson divided New Testament verses into three categories: first, passages he rejected as fanatical, superstitious, or vulgar.. Second, sayings of Jesus that he regarded as useful and textually unobjectionable. Third, verses "not free from objection, which we may with probability ascribe to Jesus himself." These are passages in which Jesus declared or intimated that he was acting under divine inspiration. Although Jefferson himself did not believe this to be true—in earlier years he spoke of Jesus as a teacher who in his last months deluded himself into believing he was God's inspired agent—he included these passages because he believed that they reflected Jesus' actual view of his ministry. In other words, says Sheridan, "Jefferson nevertheless included these on the ground that they accurately reflected the beliefs of a man who could not be expected to have been completely liberated from the superstitions of his people." [64]

Conkin's summary of "the Jefferson Bible" is outstanding:

"What he retained was a completely demystified Jesus. He included nonmiraculous biographical details, drawing more heavily on Luke than Matthew. He excluded all references to miracles or to a Holy Spirit, all ascriptions to Jesus of any special authority, and ended the biography with Jesus's death (no resurrection). For the teachings of Jesus he concentrated on his milder admonitions (the Sermon on the Mount) and his most memorable parables. What resulted is a reasonably coherent, but at places oddly truncated, biography. If necessary to exclude the miraculous, Jefferson would cut the text even in mid-verse." [40]

In other words, Barton is technically correct in insisting that "the Jefferson Bible" is not perfectly secular, that it is, in fact, not as consistently secularist as some Jefferson scholars have suggested, but his implied conclusion—that Jefferson was less hostile to the divine elements in Jesus' life and ministry than atheist scholars have argued, is an emphatic, and I think deliberate, misinterpretation. Sanford is much closer to the truth with his statement that Jefferson "emphasized the moral teachings of Jesus and avoided the incidents and declarations in the New Testament which suggest Jesus' divinity, which was the avowed intention in making his edition." [104] One could pile up refutations of Barton's wild claims from Jefferson's own pen ad nauseum.

To his protégé William Short, Jefferson wrote that one should read the four New Testament biographies of Jesus with the same skepticism and critical eye "granted in reading every other historian, such as Livy or Siculus." Jefferson specifically rejected, "e.g., The immaculate conception of Jesus, His deification, the creation of the world by him, His miraculous powers, His resurrection and visible ascension, His corporeal presence in the Eucharist, the Trinity, original sin, atonement, regeneration, election, orders of Hierarchy, etc." What could be more clear and emphatic than this? Needless to say, Barton does not cite this passage in his book.

Jefferson was not a Christian, if by Christian one means that Jesus was the son of God, a member of the Trinity, sent by God to redeem mankind, born in the womb of a virgin, a human-divine being who suspended the laws of nature at will, raised the dead, died on the cross but rose bodily to heaven on the third day. Jefferson could not subscribe to any one of these mystic propositions. In a letter to John Adams, Jefferson wrote, unreservedly, "The day will come, when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the Supreme Being as His Father, in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the Generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter." Needless to say, Barton does not quote this passage in his book.

Anti-Clericism

One of the principal errors of Barton's book is his attempt to prove that Jefferson's anti-clericism was nothing more than a distaste for the Federalist clergy who said and wrote nasty things about him during the politically stressful years between 1790 and 1809. It is certainly true, as Barton takes pains to point out, that the New England clergy said and wrote appalling things about Jefferson, and that he complained bitterly about their hostility and their lies about his character. Gaustad speaks a little too emphatically about "the depth of an anticlericism that can be laid directly at the door of the campaign of 1800." [93] Although Jefferson had been much more mildly anti-clerical before the intense partisanship and character assassinations of the period in question, he had nevertheless always argued that from the very beginning of Christianity the "priestcraft" had perverted the pure and simple ministry of Jesus in its ignoble pursuit of power and profit. In other words, his anti-clericism ran much deeper than the politics of his own time. Conkin dates his "vehement clerical opposition" at least to the late 1770s, when the still-young Jefferson drafted his Virginia Statute for Religious Liberty. Barton's claim that, "With these types of reprehensible charges coming from Federalist clergy, it should not be surprising that the comments Jefferson made about these specific Federalist ministers might indeed seem anti-clergy," [149] seriously misrepresents the truth. The election of 1800 merely deepened Jefferson's anti-clericism. "Never again after this wounding campaign would Jefferson relax regarding those clergy who lusted after preferment and power or those who would cramp or shut down the minds of humankind," Gaustad writes. [93]

To sustain his thesis, Barton is forced to overlook dozens of anti-clerical statements made by Jefferson in the course of his life. In 1816, for example, in encouraging the Dutch Unitarian Francis Adrian Van der Kemp to publish a chastened life and teachings of Jesus, Jefferson wrote, "the world will see, after the fogs shall be dispelled, in which for 14. Centuries he has been inveloped by Jeglers to make money of him, when the genuine character shall be exhibited, which they have dressed up in the rags of an Imposter, the world, I say, will at length see the immortal merit of this first of human Sages." Since the Federalists and their attendant clergy had existed for less than a quarter of a century, the Jeglers Jefferson has in mind here would appear to be something other than his immediate detractors. Needless to say, Barton does not quote this passage in his book.

In a letter that he never actually sent, Jefferson wrote, "but a short time elapsed after the death of the great reformer of the Jewish religion before his principles were departed from by those who professed to be his special servants, and perverted into an engine for enslaving mankind, and aggrandizing their oppressors in church and state." Again, those whose deliberate mission was "for enslaving mankind," were not the Federalist clergy of Jefferson's own lifetime. Barton does not cite this passage in his book.

In the same letter Jefferson called the clergy "the greatest obstacles to the advancement of the real doctrines of Jesus, and [they] do in fact constitute the real anti-Christ." It's no wonder Jefferson did not send this letter; it does not exhibit his customary civility. Barton does not quote this passage.

Jefferson said the clergy "made of Christianity a slaughter-house, through so many ages [presumably before the birth of the Federalist Party] and at this day divide it into castes of inextinguishable hatred to one another." Barton does not quote this passage in his book.

Of Jesus, Jefferson wrote, "I place Him among the greatest reformers of morals and scourges of priest-craft that have ever existed. They never rested until they had silenced Him by death. His teaching prevailed of Judaism in the long run, but the priests have rebuilt upon them the temple which He destroyed, as splendid, as profitable, and as imposing as that of before to make instruments of wealth, power, and pre-eminence to themselves." Barton does not quote this passage in his book.

Indeed, the last letter that Thomas Jefferson ever wrote included a bitter expression of anticlericalism. Writing to Roger C. Weightman to decline his invitation to attend a fiftieth anniversary celebration of the Declaration of Independence in the nation's capital, Jefferson spoke "of arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves." This letter, written on June 24, 1826, just ten days before his death, was Jefferson's final testament to what on another occasions he called the "illimitable freedom of the human mind." Gaustad concludes, "With that phrase, Jefferson fired a final shot at all repressive religion." [209]

Barton's secondary argument, that the fact that Jefferson had many friends who were pastors, ministers, theologians, preachers, and priests proves that he was not anti-clerical, is equally flawed. Jefferson was not alone in advocating a less severe or literalist Christianity. Many of his closest friends were enlightened clerics in France, England, and the United States who were engaged in the same struggle to retain what they could of the Christian inheritance and yet be true to their commitment to reason, skepticism, and science. In other words, Jefferson's clerical friends belonged to what he called the Republic of Letters—an informal worldwide association of like-minded reformers and savants. He did not always agree with the religious views of his friends—such as Benjamin Rush and Joseph Priestley—or they with his, but Jefferson chose not to pursue friendships with ministers who were doctrinaire or righteous about their piety. He did not judge others according to their religious views so long as those men were civil about their convictions and tolerant of others' views. Many of the friendships Barton points to were based not on religious questions, but rather science, love of books, a commitment to republican values, love of learning, love of America, and much more. Jefferson had friends who were Federalists, monarchists, aristocrats, bankers, severely pro-slavery and adamantly abolitionist. In relation to such men, as a natural harmony-obsessive, Jefferson's watchword was, "you and I differ; but we differ as rational friends." To conclude, as Barton apparently does, that he could only be called anti-clerical if he hated all clerics is to misunderstand Jefferson entirely. Moreover, Jefferson preferred to base his friendships on virtually any subject other than religion, where he was private, cautious, and universally respectful of others, even when he fundamentally disagreed with their views.

The Trinity

Barton also tries to convince his readers, and perhaps himself, that Jefferson did not reject the concept of the Trinity until he was well into his retirement. And though he does not say so in plain English, Barton implies that the elderly Jefferson became susceptible to Unitarian fads that were sweeping Virginia between 1812 and 1826. In other words, Barton tries to convince us that Jefferson was not susceptible to anti-Trinitarian views until he was an old man no longer fully in control of his mental faculties. This idea is as absurd and demonstrably erroneous as it is morally repugnant to suggest that the elderly Jefferson was a stooge to ideas he would have rejected as a younger man. Conkin refutes this notion in a handful of words. "In his last years," he writes, "Jefferson changed none of his core religious beliefs. They had been amazingly constant from youth." [41]

The fact is that of all the disagreements Jefferson had with traditional Christianity, his rejection of the Trinity was the most consistent and emphatic. Gaustad rightly acknowledges that "his own language of condemnation [of the Trinity] grew ever stronger" over time. In a letter to P.P. Derieux on July 25, 1788, Jefferson explained that the doctrine of the Trinity had troubled him "from a very early part of my life." [139] Eugene Sheridan writes unambiguously, "The cornerstone of Jefferson's religion was an unswerving commitment to monotheism." [65] "There was one thing about the godhead of which Jefferson was certain," Sheridan wrote, "the one true God that man was obliged to worship and adore was not the triune deity of orthodox Christianity. Jefferson had nothing but scorn for the traditional doctrine of three persons in one God." [65] In fact Jefferson, who was generally not prone to sarcasm and ridicule, openly scoffed at the notion that the "unintelligible proposition of Platonic mysticisms that three are one, and one is three; and yet one is not three, and the three are not one." He called the trinity a "hocus-pocus phantasm of a god like another Cerberus with one body and three heads." In 1816, during the period which Barton regards as his dotage, Jefferson called Trinity "the mere Abracadabra of the mountebanks calling themselves priests of Jesus."

Jefferson believed that the doctrine of the Trinity had actually been a setback from the primary religious contribution of Judaism--monotheism. "The metaphysical insanities of Athanasius, of Loyola, and of Calvin, are to my understanding, mere relapses into polytheism, differing in paganism only by being more unintelligible," he wrote.

University of Virginia

Barton attempts to prove that capstone achievement of Jefferson's life, the University of Virginia at Charlottesville, was not the first truly secular institution of higher education in the United States, but what he prefers to call "America's first transdenominational school—a school not affiliated with one specific denomination but rather one that would train students from all denominations." [44]. Not quite. What Jefferson established was a state-sponsored secular university that welcomed religious seminaries to spring up in its periphery. Jefferson was not opposed to religious training for young men; he just didn't want that to be one of the functions of the university he designed in his retirement. In fact, Jefferson made no provision at UVA for professors of divinity or even a chaplain. The seventeen buildings he painstakingly designed did not include a chapel.

After the appointment of the Unitarian Thomas Cooper to the professorship in chemistry caused a controversy so pronounced that it jeopardized the very existence of the university, Jefferson and the Board of Visitors voted to allow "the different religious sects to establish, each for itself, a professorship of their own tenets, on the confines of the university." Students attending these religious academies would be permitted to use the UVA library, attend university lectures (free), and use UVA facilities. The Board insisted, however, that it was bent on "preserving . . . their independence of us and each other." Jefferson "let it be known," writes the eminent Jefferson scholar Garry Wills, "that religious bodies could hold student services of their own, so long as none was sponsored by the university itself." [25-26]

Jefferson quietly hoped that by mingling all of the religious sects in the same vicinity, under the overarching umbrella of his secular university, that "we shall soften their asperities, liberalize and neutralize their prejudices." Jefferson even dreamed that this free mingling would inspire students to move away from the peculiarities of their religious denominations towards a more natural, more Unitarian religious outlook.

Earlier in his career, Jefferson had managed to abolish the two professorships of divinity at the College of William and Mary, his alma mater, where he was now a member of the board of visitors, replacing one of them with a professorship of law and another of science.

Wall of Separation between Church and State

Barton's most successful argument in The Jefferson Lies is that Jefferson was not as strict in his time about the "wall of separation between church and state" as the ACLU, the American judicial establishment, and "Jeffersonians" are in our time. On this score, Barton makes a very important point. I believe he seriously (and deliberately) overstates his case, but there are enough verifiable breaches of the wall of separation in Jefferson's life to prove that he was not a doctrinaire absolutist in the public arena.

Here are some of Barton's claims: as a young legislator Jefferson proposed a day of fasting and prayer in Virginia; in revising the law code of Virginia, Jefferson retained several laws enforcing religious observance; in his revision of the law code, Jefferson retained references to God in oaths taken by office holders; Jefferson's motto was "Rebellion to Tyrants is Obedience to God"; both as vice president and president of the United States, Jefferson permitted Christian religious observances in federal buildings; President Jefferson permitted the Marine Corps band to play at religious services in the Capitol; Jefferson instructed the secretary of war to provide federal funds to a religious school established for the Cherokee Indians of Tennessee; Jefferson used federal funds to pay Christian ministers to civilize Indians in the south and west; Jefferson closed a number of presidential documents with the phrase "In the year of our Lord Christ." Etc. To which Barton adds, "There are many additional examples, and they all clearly demonstrate that Jefferson has no record of attempting to secularize the public square." [137]

Some of these claims have a kernel of truth in them, or what the comedian and political commentator Stephen Colbert calls "truthiness." Others are just nonsense. There is not much to be made of the fact that certain printed government forms contained the words "In the year of our Lord Christ." This was bureaucratic boilerplate, certainly not written by Jefferson himself, contrary to his theological viewpoint. One may as well argue that if Jefferson wrote that he rode his horse in 1803 A.D. [anno domini] that he was acknowledging his Christianity. Barton seems not to understand the role of convention and established tradition in American life in the early national period. The president permitted ecumenical religious services to take place in the Capitol because it was one of the few places in the new national capital large enough to accommodate a congregation. The services were officiated in turn by each of the religious groups in the district, and Jefferson often was in attendance. As a pragmatist, he probably lost little sleep over such technical violations of the separation doctrine. Gaustad's analysis seems right. "Jefferson could not altogether avoid the priestly role that presidential powers thrust upon him, but he did reject the more intrusive elements which that 'bully pulpit' afforded." [98]

Barton argues that President Jefferson's only reason for declining to name a national day of thanksgiving and prayer was his conviction that such things were the sovereign province of the states, not the national government. Not so. It is true that Jefferson took the Tenth Amendment seriously, and sought always to limit the national government's footprint in American life. But the whole tenor of his civic thought insists that one's religious life is private and morally and legally distinct from the proper sphere of government. He was roundly criticized in some circles for refusing to use the national government to declare days of national religious observance. In no instance did he argue that individual states should make such declarations and proclamations. Barton is simply wrong to argue that Jefferson's primary concern was the preservation of states rights. On the contrary, his primary concern was to keep the government (any government) from intruding into what he regarded as private space—the conscience and religious outlook of the individual. Jefferson regarded freedom of conscience as an inalienable right—that is, a right never to be entrusted to government, a right that could not legitimately be entrusted to government, a right to be jealousy guarded against any invasion by any government, state, local, or national.

It is true that as a young Virginia legislator Jefferson proposed a public day of fasting and prayer in response to England's retaliatory Boston Port Bill. He was using a well-worn political tool in 1774, when he was still feeling his way into serious statesmanship. Jefferson was just 31 years old at the time, still a little timid, just beginning to find his revolutionary stride. Such tactics do not square with his more mature thinking on the separation of church and state. That Jefferson was later embarrassed that he and his fellow revolutionaries had employed a somewhat demagogic tactic in the Boston port crisis is shown in the language he used to describe the event in his fragmentary autobiography, in 1821: "We cooked up a resolution." Gaustad says that Jefferson "casting about for some acceptable means of awakening public opinion in a lethargic Virginia, chose a time-honored technique that would meet with universal approbation. Was it a propaganda ploy? Yes." [103]

It is also true that the Jefferson administration continued the efforts of his predecessors to fund Christian missions among Indian tribes. Like everyone else, Gaustad wonders what to make of this apparent breach of the wall of separation. His conclusion is that the purpose of these funds was not to convert or proselytize Indians but to civilize them, and that Christian missions, begun under the auspices of previous administrations, had proved quite successful in bringing certain Indian tribes into the American orbit. In other words, "The purpose was not religious but political," Gaustad writes, "to stabilize the relationship between the government and the Indians by means other than war and to mitigate their hostility toward the United States." [101] In continuing to fund these missions Jefferson was merely taking "advantage of the most readily available means . . . for achieving" his civilizing purposes. This is an instance of Jefferson's pragmatism, which occasionally could tend towards opportunism. In other words, Jefferson was not interested in converting Indians to Christianity, but he did not strenuously object to the use of a much-simplified Christian template as a civilizing tool.

James Madison actually warned Jefferson that his apparent endorsement of Christian missions to Indian tribes might lead some to conclude that Jefferson was not in earnest about his wall of separation. Jefferson replied with characteristic pragmatism: the missions were accomplishing his goal—of acculturation at low cost to the public. The tribes in question lived far from the centers of American power and government. Jefferson understood that spirituality was one of the Indians' principal lenses on the universe. The president saw no reason to discontinue a modest but successfully program just to maintain a principle that was more rigorously enforced in American population centers.

It is worth noting that in his instructions to Meriwether Lewis in June 1803, Jefferson made no reference to Christianity or to missionary activity of any sort. Lewis and Clark were to carry a number of important messages to the fifty-plus Indian tribes they met—mostly having to do with trade and the advantages of peaceful coexistence with other Indians—but a religious message was definitely not included in the instructions. Lewis and Clark carried a small reference library with them into the wilderness—all the way to the Pacific Ocean and back again. Among the eleven or so books was no copy of the Bible or the Book of Common Prayer. When Charles Floyd died on August 20, 1804, his funeral service derived from the military manual of Baron von Steuben rather than the Bible.

Still, if a fair observer adds up the specific instances of President Jefferson's flexibility on the question of separation of church and state, it seems clear (to me at least) that Jefferson was less strict than he has been made to seem by some modern biographers. Barton is right to insist that these Jeffersonian inconsistencies—at least one of which disturbed the ever-vigilant Madison—indicate that Jefferson's practical policies as president suggest (at least for that time and place) a more porous wall of separation between church and state than is dictated by state and federal court rulings in the post World War II period. It is quite possible that the courts (and nonprofit organizations such as the ACLU) have made more of the wall of separation than Jefferson (in his own lifetime) intended, or at least dared to enforce. Instead of suggesting that Jefferson was a traditional Christian, or trying to reclaim "the Jefferson Bible" as a Christian document, Barton would have been better served in arguing that Jefferson's phrase "wall of separation" has become far more powerful than it ought to have, perhaps more powerful than Jefferson intended. As Gaustad suggests, "By a quirk of memory or rhetoric, Jefferson's 'wall of separation' phrase, to be found nowhere in the Constitution, came to grow more familiar than the constitutional language itself." [99]

Towards the end of his book, Barton writes categorically, "Were Jefferson alive today, he would undoubtedly be one of the loudest voices against a secularized public square." [195] We have no way of knowing this of course. If Jefferson were alive today, aside from being 269 years old, it is not clear how his thinking would have evolved. Jefferson was tenaciously committed to his core set of ideas, but he famously said that "forty years of experience in government is worth a century of book reading." The Jefferson who actually lived between 1743 and 1826 may be characterized as a halfway Christian and a quasi atheist. His rationality, skepticism, and distaste for metaphysics led him to question all the counter-rational aspects of received Christianity, including the godhead and resurrection of Jesus. He was too respectful a man to declare himself an atheist and to jettison the Christian tradition altogether, though he toyed with that idea in his young adulthood when he was most under the influence of Bolingbroke. Jefferson could never really let go of the idea that the world was created by God, a clockmaker Newtonian physicist and planet spinner, and he could not finally abandon the idea that God played some kind of providential role in the affairs of humankind, particularly the American experiment. He did not decisively reject the idea of an afterlife, though he knocked on the door of that notion, and he did not fully reject the idea that God would somehow sit in judgment of human actions, including the actions of nations.

Still, if Jefferson were alive today it seems likely that he would be a more thoroughgoing secularist than he was in his time, for several reasons. First, his principal allegiance was to science. Jefferson lived on the other side of the Freudian and Darwinian divide. He did not understand evolution, though Darwin's grandfather Erasmus Darwin was teasing the edges of the theory in Birmingham, England, as the principal member of the Lunar Society, of which Jefferson's mentor William Small was for a time a member. The revolutionary breakthroughs in astronomy, neurology, quantum mechanics, genetic theory, psychology, medicine, geology, and other hard sciences since 1826 have explained the world in a way that would have been unthinkable in Jefferson's era. If the French philosophe Baron d'Holbach (1723-1789) could speak of man as a machine in the eighteenth century, when all the sciences were in their infancy, the staggering advances in every science in the two hundred years since Jefferson's death would merely have confirmed Jefferson's materialism and his conviction that the world is knowable to those who have eyes and measuring devices to observe it. One need only imagine Jefferson's reaction to the unlocking of the genetic code, or to the images beamed back by the Hubble Telescope, or to radioactive dating techniques in geology, to see that in our time he would almost certainly be more allied with the outlook of Carl Sagan and Richard Dawkins than with obscurantists like David Barton.

Furthermore, if Jefferson advocated a wall of separation between church and state in 1802, when the population of the United States, at about six million, was overwhelmingly, almost unanimously "Christians" in some sense of that term, he would almost certainly be for a higher and wider wall now, in a pluralistic nation with a population of 330 million, in which four million Americans identify themselves as Jews, 1.6 million Muslims, 1.6 million Buddhists, more than a million Hindus, and 433,000 who identify themselves as Wiccan/Pagan/Druid. Although a full 76% of the American people now regard themselves as Christian, almost a third of all Americans now identify themselves as not-Christian, including 39 million who regard themselves as non-religious or secular. Those who argue that the Founding Fathers envisioned a Christian nation confuse demographics with political intention. The great majority of the American people in1776 or 1801 were Christians, but the Constitution they wrote and ratified was surprisingly even startlingly secular. In the ongoing historical debate about church and state, the single most important fact of the founding of the United States was that it occurred during the high water mark of the American Enlightenment. It is hard to imagine a constitution as rigorously secular in language or intent if the country had been founded one generation sooner or one generation later than it was. To paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, All honor to men like Jefferson and Madison—to the men who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into our national charters, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there, that to-day, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression.

Jefferson's flexibility on separation of church and state is truly remarkable and, as Gaustad indicates, sometimes puzzling. It troubles some Jeffersonians who wish their secularist hero had been more punctilious about the wall of separation. Jefferson was not a doctrinaire ideologue.

Straw Man Fallacy

A straw man is a bogey who doesn't really exist, set up by a disputant merely for the sake of knocking him down. David Barton has adopted the extraordinary strategy of creating a whole legion of straw men and women. Although he limits his ad hominem attacks to deconstructionists, poststructuralists, modernists, minimalists, and academic collectivists, the larger tribe of his secularist enemies includes everyone who is engaged in what Barton calls the "incestuous system of peer review," in other words, the entire academic establishment. Barton boldly claims that he alone has returned to the "original documents as the standard for truth." The academics, he explains, merely quote from each other, without bothering to do the hard work, which he has undertaken, of consulting primary source documents. This is offensive nonsense.

Barton pretends that secular scholars are ashamed of Jefferson's intensive interest in ethics and moral principles. "In today's shallow academic climate of Minimalism and Modernism, Jefferson's preoccupation with the study of morals seems eccentric and out of the ordinary," Barton writes. "It is usually dismissed as nothing more than what critics consider to be a thinly veiled subterfuge masking his true hatred of the Bible." [74-75] This is literal nonsense. Jefferson was deeply interested in the moral underpinnings of human action, in part because he wanted to disestablish state churches in America. Jefferson understood that many thoughtful men believed that religion was essential to an orderly society. Take away Christianity and what holds American civilization together? Jefferson was acutely interested in that question, partly because he envisioned a republic characterized by harmony, severely limited government, mutual respect, and a minimum of formal law, and partly because he was determined to separate freedom of conscience from any government control.

Jefferson found his solution in the idea of the moral sense, which he borrowed from the writings of the Scottish Enlightenment. According to Lord Kames (Henry Home), Francis Hutcheson, and Thomas Reid, man is born with an innate moral sense that guides us inerrantly through life. Jefferson wrote about the workings of the moral sense throughout his life. He gave the concept his most interesting articulation in a letter he wrote in 1787 to his nephew Peter Carr:

"He who made us would have been a pitiful bungler, if he had made the rules of our moral conduct a matter of science. For one man of science, there are thousands who are not. What would have become of them? Man was destined for society. His morality, therefore, was to be formed to this object. He was endowed with a sense of right and wrong merely relative to this. This sense is as much a part of his nature, as the sense of hearing, seeing, feeling; it is the true foundation of morality... The moral sense, or conscience, is as much a part of man as his leg or arm. It is given to all human beings in a stronger or weaker degree, as force of members is given them in a greater or less degree. It may be strengthened by exercise, as may any particular limb of the body. This sense is submitted indeed in some degree to the guidance of reason; but it is a small stock which is required for this: even a less one than what we call Common sense. State a moral case to a ploughman and a professor. The former will decide it as well, and often better than the latter, because he has not been led astray by artificial rules."

Thus Jefferson believed that a society in which religion had been detached from the workings of the state, where individuals were free to worship one god or twenty or none at all, would not descend into pandemonium and a Hobbesian jungle. On the contrary, so long as public education focused on the strengthening and clarification of the moral sense, people would thrive in a society in which church and state had been thoroughly separated. At no point did Jefferson minimize the importance of ethical training and moral reasoning in his dream of America. Conkin writes, "he knew that the type of self-discipline, and at times the courage to do right, to follow the dictates of conscience, was the pressing practical moral problem for himself and for others." In fact, Jefferson clung to the idea of an afterlife and some form of divine judgment of human actions, in direct opposition to his scientific skepticism and thorough materialism, because he understood that "people needed the authority, or the inspiration, to live up to basic moral imperatives shared by all people, whatever their cultural differences." [Conkin 24] So far as I know, no serious Jefferson scholar has ever tried to minimize his commitment to these social values.

Sally Hemings

Even though Barton is, in my opinion, demonstrably wrong in his chapters on Jefferson's religious views, sometimes more and sometimes less, the religious material in his book is much superior to the two chapters on slavery and race. The first of the "lies" Barton seeks to expose is the now widely held view that Jefferson had a decades-long sexual relationship with one of his slaves Sally Hemings, and fathered a child or children by her.

Barton's argument goes something like this. The DNA tests conducted in 1998 were not as conclusive as most people believe. They only indicate that some male member of the Jefferson family fathered one of Sally Hemings's children. (The other children's lines of descent were not tested). There is no way of knowing, from the DNA tests that were conducted, precisely which Jefferson was the father of Eston Hemings. From a purely scientific point of view, the father may have been Jefferson's brother Randolph, who was known to frequent the slave quarters at Monticello, or Randolph's sons, or Jefferson's uncle Field Jefferson, or a number of others. Since there is no way of proving (from the DNA tests that have so far been conducted) that the father of Eston Hemings was our Jefferson, the Thomas Jefferson, it is clear, says Barton, that it was not Thomas Jefferson. This is the quality of his historical argumentation.

Barton gets sidetracked by suggesting that the Jefferson-Hemings DNA announcement in 1998 was co-opted, including by Pulitzer Prize winning historian Joseph Ellis, as a "defense" of the sitting president, William Jefferson Clinton, who was, at the time of the announcement, weathering a humiliating national scandal resulting from his dalliances with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. If it could be shown that even Thomas Jefferson had sexual skeletons in his closet—"they all do it"—then president Clinton's misbehavior had some very distinguished company, from JFK through FDR all the way back to the founding father Jefferson. The Jefferson DNA revelations, Barton argues, had a softening effect on the glare of the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal. True though this may be, it has nothing to do with the truth or falsehood of the DNA tests.

Barton makes much of the fact that the initial reports of the DNA test overstated the results. The title of the original article in Nature (November 5, 1998) was "Jefferson Fathered Slave's Last Child." Eight weeks later, a little sheepishly, Nature printed what Barton calls a "retraction," though in fact it was actually more in the nature of a clarification. The correction rightly pointed out that a Jefferson or some Jefferson fathered Eston Hemings, but that the DNA study could not verify that the father was Thomas Jefferson. Barton does not bother to concede that the "retraction" in no way rules Jefferson out as the father of Sally Hemings' fifth child Eston. Instead, with sweeping and baseless confidence, he concludes, "this category of evidence is now discredited." This is not true at all. Without further studies, based on samples of Jefferson's own DNA, there is no scientific way to determine whether the father of Eston Hemings was our Jefferson or some other male member of the Jefferson line. Given the state of our current genetic knowledge Jefferson would probably be exonerated in a court of law. But in the court of careful historical analysis his innocence is far less certainly established.

Barton makes no effort to analyze the large amount of circumstantial evidence that points to Jefferson as the father of at least some of Sally Hemings' children, much of it gathered and carefully analyzed in Annette Gordon-Reed's remarkable book, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy. Barton is content to hang his hat on the reasonable doubt left by the DNA tests of 1998, and the fact that the originator of the Sally Hemings story, James Callender (1758-1803), was a rogue and a scoundrel who made a number of factual mistakes in the series of character assassinations he printed about Jefferson in a Richmond, Virginia, newspaper. Needless to say, Callender's character flaws do not necessarily mean that his basic allegation—that Hemings' was Jefferson's "concubine"—is false. Nor does Barton acknowledge that Jefferson's cash contributions to Callender between 1796 and 1800, $50 here and $50 there, were intended to encourage the British scandalmonger to write newspaper articles and pamphlets sharply critical of John Adams and the Adams administration. For those irresponsible partisan attacks, Callender expected to be rewarded by Jefferson when he became president in 1801, preferably as the postmaster of Richmond. When no sinecure was proffered him, Callender turned on his former patron and "broke" the Sally Hemings story in September 1802, as well as the allegation that Jefferson had attempted to seduce his neighbor John Walker's wife. All of this led Abigail Adams—bitter over the unscrupulous political tactics Jefferson had used against her husband—to write, with venomous accuracy, "The serpent [Callender] you cherished and warmed, bit the hand that nourished him, and gave you sufficient Specimens of his talents, his gratitude, his justice, and his truth." Jefferson's attempt to convince Mrs. Adams that his cash payments to Callender were grocery money did not convince the sharp-minded and sharp-tongued former First Lady.

Nor does Barton bother to try to make sense of the testimony of Sally Hemings' son Madison Hemings in Ohio in 1873. There, living as a free man, 47 years after the death of Jefferson and 38 years after the death of his mother, Madison Hemings told the Pike County Republican that his mother had informed him that Thomas Jefferson was his father and that she had returned from France in 1789 pregnant with Jefferson's child. It used to be common for Jefferson biographers to dismiss Madison Hemings' recollections as sensational, factually imprecise, or unreliable, but more recent scholars have been trying to make sense of the memoir, which would seem to have some claim to authenticity coming from the child of the woman in question long after she and Thomas Jefferson were dead. Madison's account of the relationship between his mother and Jefferson is a fascinating document. Among other things Madison Hemings said that his mother realized that under French law she need not return to the United States with Jefferson in 1789. Madison Hemings says flatly, "she refused to return with him." Jefferson coaxed her into returning to Monticello with the promise that she would have "extraordinary privileges," and that he "made a solemn pledge that her children should be freed at the age of twenty-one years." Jefferson did free all of Hemings children when they reached their maturity.

At the end of his problematic chapter on the Hemings controversy, Barton concludes: "In summery, there exists no evidence, either modern or ancient, that Thomas Jefferson fathered even one child with Sally Hemings, much less five." [30] This is demonstrably untrue, unless by "evidence" Barton means evidence that he would find persuasive.

My own view, for what little it is worth, is that the Sally Hemings allegations are more likely true than not true, that the circumstantial evidence points pretty clearly towards Jefferson, and the DNA tests certainly don't rule him out. But the DNA tests do not establish paternity with certainty. For the moment, therefore, it is certainly a respectable historical position to conclude that Jefferson ought to be given the benefit of the doubt, until such time as conclusive proof is offered of his sexual relationship with Hemings. As Jefferson scholar Andrew Burstein concludes, "As to actual evidence in the matter of Sally Hemings, nothing fully satisfies." [230]

At the end of his book, Barton returns to the Hemings controversy to write, "There is absolutely no historical, factual, or scientific evidence to tarnish the sexual morality of Jefferson." [193] Actually, this, too, is demonstrably wrong. Jefferson himself admitted (in 1805) to having tried to seduce Betsy Walker, the wife of his friend and neighbor John Walker, when "young and single." That would seem to tarnish his "sexual morality," as would the affair he conducted with a married woman, Maria Cosway, in France in 1786 and 1787. It is not clear that Jefferson's relationship with the Anglo-Italian painter and coquette was consummated, but it was undeniably adulterous. Although these escapades in no way determine the validity of the Sally Hemings story, they show what a poor historian David Barton is.

Race and Slavery

Barton (lie #4) attempts to refute the view that Jefferson was a racist who opposed equality for Black Americans. As with most of the fundamental issues in Jefferson's life and achievement, this one is a paradox. On the one hand, Jefferson knew that slavery was wrong, acknowledged that in denying black people their equal rights he and other Americans were convicting themselves of being not only oppressors but base hypocrites. On the other hand, after making a few serious attempts to create a legal and social climate of emancipation in the years 1774-1787, Jefferson settled into a long period of hand-wringing and temporizing, punctuated from time to time by the penning of slightly hysterical spasms of guilt and moral indignation, always reserved for private correspondence. Jefferson never doubted that slavery was wrong, but he bought and sold slaves all of his life, parried the puzzled queries of his abolitionist friends with his characteristic pose of pained helplessness, and somehow slept soundly at night. In short, for all of his rhetorical brilliance and seeming candor, Thomas Jefferson learned to live with slavery.

It is certainly true that Jefferson never directly defended slavery. It is equally true that a Jefferson apologist can string together an impressive set of initiatives put forward by Jefferson to free American slaves—immediately or over time--and to restrain the odious slave trade. As virtually every Jefferson scholar knows, one of his first legislative actions was to co-sponsor a bill in the Virginia House of Burgesses in 1769 that would have would have permitted manumission of slaves under carefully controlled circumstances. That bill was overwhelmingly defeated, Jefferson reported, and the well-respected co-sponsor Richard Bland was "denounced as an enemy of his country." Jefferson also included in the Declaration of Independence a shrill indictment of George III of England for perpetuating the slave trade, thus waging "cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people which never offended him." That paragraph, the longest single paragraph in the Declaration, was expunged from the final version of the document "in complaisance to South Carolina and Georgia, who had never attempted to restrain the importation of slaves, and who, on the contrary, still wished to continue it."

Barton compiles the usual list of enlightened statements and actions undertaken by Jefferson. It is a very impressive list, and it is important to remember that Jefferson was taking considerable political risks in condemning slavery so passionately and advocating immediate or gradual emancipation. He was also, of course, exposing himself to the charge of gross hyprocrisy since he only managed to free eight of his several hundred slaves, three during the course of his life, and five at the time of his death in 1826. He hunted down free slaves with some zeal, offering rewards for their return, and causing the recalcitrant to be punished either by flogging or by being sold to less "humane" slaveholders. He told the British visitor Augustus John Foster in 1807, that Negroes "were born to carry burdens," and the underlying but never candidly stated argument of his literary masterpiece Notes on the State of Virginia was that black Africans were what Aristotle called "natural slaves," i.e., beings who were apparently incapable of living lives of true self-reliance and therefore fitted by the natural economy of things for life on benevolent slave plantations. Barton mentions none of this evidence in his defense of Jefferson.

It is true that in Notes on the State of Virginia Jefferson wrote a furious denunciation of slavery, culminating in the melodramatic passage, "And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis—a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the gift of God? . . . Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that his justice cannot sleep forever." Jefferson did indeed write that in the case of a slave rebellion, "the Almighty has not attribute which can take side with us [white masters] in such a contest." He was never comfortable with his status as a slaveholder, but he never seriously attempted to extricate himself from what he called an "execrable practice."

Strong stuff. On the other hand, the plain truth is that Jefferson could just about come to terms with the general emancipation of American slaves (he once called the economic disaster that would follow a "mere bagatelle."), but he could never envision a biracial republic in which free whites lived side by side with freed blacks. Chiseled on the wall of the magnificent Jefferson Memorial in Washington, D.C., dedicated in 1943, is the lovely sentiment that "Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that people are to be free." But the designers of the memorial left off the rest of the sentiment. The full passage reads as follows:

"Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people are to be free. Nor is it less certain that the two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government. Nature, habit, opinion has drawn indelible lines of distinction between them. It is still in our power to direct the process of emancipation and deportation peaceably and in such slow degree as that the evil will wear off insensibly, and their place be pari passu filled up by free white laborers."

Jefferson was, in fact, an apartheidist. He spent countless hours trying to figure out how slaves could be freed and then immediately repatriated in their native Africa. He was an early subscriber to the repatriation societies in Liberia (the place of the freed) and Sierra Leon. He once tried to calculate how many ships it would take to deport all of the black people of the United States to Africa or perhaps an island in the Caribbean, carefully making allowances for the high birth rate among American slaves. What he discovered was discouraging: the black population was already too large ever to be successfully deported. This does not sound like the social equality that Barton believes characterized Jefferson's thinking about race. All this is sobering and disheartening, coming from a man who has until recently been called the American "apostle of liberty," but the actual historical record is much worse. Although Barton quite rightly quotes liberally from the countless emancipationist statements made by Jefferson over a lifetime, he entirely omits the second disquisition of race and slavery in Notes on Virginia, wherein Jefferson attempts to provide a scientific explanation of the differences between the white and black races. (I hate even to copy these words, because they are so appalling).

Negroes, said Jefferson, are less highly evolved because they cannot blush; the "eternal monotony" and "immoveable veil of black" indicate a more primitive status on the chain of being. Just as orangutans mate with human women whenever possible, so black men prefer to mate with white women. Why? Races like to breed up. Negroes have a peculiar odor, perhaps because "they secrete less by the kidnies, and more by the glands of the skin, which gives them a very strong and disagreeable odor." They require less sleep than their white counterparts, as evidenced by their willingness to stay up half the night dancing after spending dawn to dusk laboring for their white masters in the fields. When idle they tend merely to sleep rather than engage in the arts of self-improvement. The males are "more ardent after their female" than their white counterparts. They are "much inferior" in thinking and reasoning, "as I think one could scarcely be found capable of tracing and comprehending the investigations of Euclid [i.e., basic geometry]."

And on and on. Jefferson concludes all of this trash with the statement, quoted by Barton, "I advance it therefore as a suspicion only, that the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments of both body and mind." This is loathsome stuff, the more loathsome because Jefferson cast his race prejudices in the form of serious biological science. As Gaustad charitably concludes, in his disquisitions on race, "Here, Enlightenment optimism faltered, with national consequences that were tragic." [76]

Barton makes much of Jefferson's reluctance to declare blacks inferior: "I advance it therefore as a suspicion only. . . ." Indeed Jefferson was reluctant, but of course his pose as a scrupulous and sympathetic anthropologist wringing his hands but compelled by the body of evidence before him to pronounce blacks "inferior to the whites in the endowments of both body and mind," has the ironic effect of making things even worse. Barton's conclusion that Jefferson "lightly questioned whether blacks might be inferior," does not, in my view, do justice to Jefferson's statement. [97]

I take no joy in challenging Barton's agreeable mythology about Jefferson, race, and slavery. I agree with Barton when he says that had Jefferson been born in New York or Pennsylvania, where slavery was rare and already well on the road to extinction, had he owned no slaves, "he would be universally hailed today as a bold civil rights leader." The tragedy of Thomas Jefferson is that he was born in Virginia. His whole life was convoluted by the fact of southern slavery. His whole achievement must now be seen as inextricably interwoven with the fact of his complicity—however reluctant, however much the better angels of his existence knew better-- Monticello was largely built by slave laborers. The University of Virginia was built by gangs of slaves. Jefferson's White House staff consisted of eleven slaves he brought to the national capital from Monticello. The desk on which he wrote the Declaration of Independence was crafted by a slave carpenter.

At the end of his chapter on race and slavery, Barton concludes, "Modern writers [those nasty deconstructionists] now refuse to recognize what previous generations openly acknowledged: Jefferson was a bold, staunch, and consistent advocate and defender of emancipation and civil rights." Bold yes, consistent no, and advocate of equal civil rights for black Americans, not at all. Modern writers refuse to recognize what previous generations openly acknowledged for a very good reason; previous generations gave Jefferson far too much benefit of the doubt on this front, and today's scholars have rightly corrected the imbalance—some of them, it is true, to excess.

Miscellaneous Errors

Barton makes a large number of factual errors in the course of his book. It would be interesting to enumerate all of them, but it would be a tedious and thankless task, and the book is not sufficiently important in Jefferson studies to merit the scores of hours it would take to correct all of them. A few will suffice to show the level of historiography in The Jefferson Lies. Almost all historians make mistakes. The problem with Barton's errors is that many of them seem to be deliberate distortions.

1. David Hume. Barton argues that Jefferson was attracted to Hume's cosmopolitan essays as a young man, but came to regret the influence the outspoken atheist Hume had had on him. He quotes Jefferson as saying, "research and reflection . . . were necessary to eradicate the poison it [Hume's writing] had instilled into my mind." Jefferson's quarrel with Hume had nothing to do with religion. Jefferson was fully aware of Hume's genius. What he came to detest in Hume was the Scottish philosophe's Tory history of Great Britain, not his religious views. When James Madison was beginning to do research for his labors at the Constitutional Convention, he asked Jefferson to send him books on law and constitutions. Jefferson sent his best friend the complete works of Hume, as well as many other books that Barton would regard as irreligious.

2. Thomas Francois Raynal (the Abbe Raynal). Barton argues that Jefferson found fault with Raynal for his anti-clerical perspectives and freethinking writings. Not so. Jefferson's quarrel with Raynal was not about religion. He detested Raynal's prejudicial statements about the flora, fauna, and aboriginal peoples of the New World, which Raynal argued were degenerate with respect to their old world counterparts. Jefferson's famous quarrel with Raynal, the Comte de Buffon and the degeneracy theory are well known. In fact, Jefferson had a moose carcass sent to him from New Hampshire by Governor John Sullivan to present to Buffon as the "ocular proof" that the animals of the western hemisphere were not inferior to those of Europe. It was Raynal's negative statements about the fecundity and climate of the New World that led Jefferson to write that his works contained "a mass of errors and misconceptions from beginning to end." It is true that Jefferson called Raynal a "mere shrimp." But the context for that little specimen of Jeffersonian humor was that Dr. Franklin had, at a dinner party in France, disproved the degeneracy theory by asking the Americans to stand up side-by-side with the skeptical Frenchmen. The Americans towered over the diminutive French guests at the dinner, one of whom was the "mere shrimp" Raynal. Barton suggests that Jefferson's insult was meant to be a characterization of Raynal's moral stature. In fact, it was about his physiognomy—and only then because of the degeneracy debate.

3. Francis Bacon. Barton calls the eminent British jurist, philosopher, scientist, and essayist, "This outspoken and famous Christian writer." Bacon was a Christian in some sense of the term, but to characterize him as a "famous Christian writer" effectively misrepresents his great achievements in epistemology, international law, science, and the principle of induction.

4. Dr. John Witherspoon. Barton argues that Jefferson's request that Witherspoon provide him one of his students as a teacher in a Virginia grammar school in 1783 shows that Jefferson was seeking a young man with a strong Christian character and education. "What would Jefferson expect from students trained by the Reverend Dr. Witherspoon?" Barton asks. Barton is apparently unaware that Dr. Witherspoon was a man of the Enlightenment (though a pious Christian), a lover of natural science, and a member of the international Republic of Letters. It was for this reason, not for the religious training of the College of New Jersey (today's Princeton) that Jefferson contacted him on behalf of the grammar school. Among Witherspoon's famous students were James Madison, like Jefferson a staunch advocate of separation of church and state, and Aaron Burr.

5. Religious Observance at the University of Virginia. In a set of protocols written by the Board of Visitors for the University of Virginia, Jefferson, on behalf of his fellow Visitors, wrote, "Should the religious sects of this State, or any of them, according to the invitation held out to them, establish within, or adjacent to, the precincts of the University, schools for instruction in the religion of their sect, the students of the University will be free, and expected to attend religious worship at the establishment of their respective sects." Barton misunderstands Jefferson's use of the term expected. What he means is that if a student wished to attend chapel, the expectation was that he would attend the chapel appropriate for his religious affiliation. In other words, Jefferson is not saying students were required to attend chapel, but that it would be natural for each to attend the chapel that resonated with his religious background and outlook.

6. Jefferson's languages. Barton has Jefferson knowing Greek, Latin, French, Italian, Spanish, German, and English, when in fact Jefferson knew almost no German. In fact, knew three ancient and four modern languages. The third of his ancient languages was Anglo Saxon. He was so passionate about the need for liberty-loving Americans to learn the early English that enshrined the English-speaking peoples' first experiments with democracy that Jefferson actually wrote an Anglo-Saxon grammar.

7. Authorship of the Constitution. Barton says that "many of today's writers and scholars" [117] wrongly believe that Jefferson participated in the writing of the U.S. Constitution. In my travels I have found that many average Americans wrongly believe that Jefferson played a hand in the writing of the Constitution, but I know of no historian or biographer who makes that claim.

Conclusion

David Barton's The Jefferson Lies is a dangerous book. Although some of the arguments Barton develops might have served as a corrective to the somewhat over-secularized portrait of Jefferson that has emerged in recent years, he greatly overstates his case, omits whatever does not fit his preconceived notions about Jefferson, distorts the truth, takes Jefferson's pronouncements out of context, and lines up a series of straw men to cast down on behalf of his irresponsible claims.

It is unfortunate that Barton has written such a problematic book. Jefferson deserves better, as does the American public. As Paul Conkin has written, "Religious issues were so pervasive and so important in his life that ignorance of them precludes any holistic or undistorted understanding of either his character of his thought." [19] In other words, Jefferson, as one of the principal articulators of American ideals, deserves a serious exploration of all that he wrote and did in the course of a long live that spanned the founding of the American republic. The last thing we need is a book that muddies rather than clarifies the debate about Jefferson's religious views and the place of organized religion in the constitutional settlement of the United States.

No reputable scholar can call Thomas Jefferson an atheist. Although he was one of the most freethinking Americans of his time, Jefferson never broke with Christianity altogether. Barton is so certain that irresponsible academics are teaching our children that Jefferson was an atheist that he seems not to have explored the requisite literature—high school and college textbooks, Jefferson biographies by such individuals as Merrill Peterson, Dumas Malone, Joseph Ellis, Alf Mapp, jr., Fawn Brodie (etc.), or the handful of serious studies of Jefferson and religion (see above).

If Barton had written a careful and respectful book that attempted to show that Jefferson was less eager to clear the public square of religious activity than many jurists and scholars of our time believe, he would have made an important contribution to the national debate over the wall of separation of church and state. And that, really, is the core mission of men and women who share Barton's views. They share former President Ronald Reagan's "outrage" that we have "expelled God from the classroom," and they despise court decisions that force crèches off courthouse lawns, the Ten Commandments off of the walls of classrooms and judges, and prayer out of baccalaureate ceremonies. Barton [128-129] makes a list of what he considers outrageous applications of the separation doctrine in our time.

Barton's best chance to influence the debate would have been to provide a thoughtful analysis of Jefferson's flexibility on questions of church and state. Still, because The Jefferson Lies has received a great deal of national attention, it has forced serious Jefferson scholars to step forward to correct Barton's distortions of the historical record. The national debate touched off by The Jefferson Lies is one that American needs to undertake in a thoughtful, factual, nuanced, and mutually respectful way. The precise meaning of the First Amendment continues to elude philosophers, historians, theologians, and jurists. Barton's basic premise is not contemptible: that the Founding Fathers probably did not intend as secular a nation as we have become, and that it would be legitimate to conclude from the life and achievements of Thomas Jefferson that his troubling phrase "wall of separation between church and state" has in recent decades been read much more rigorously than he seems to have intended it, surely in a way more rigorous than his practical application of the principle in the course of his presidency.

Barton also lost the opportunity to find fault with the general shallowness of Jefferson's religious thinking. Jefferson's attempt to distinguish the wheat from the chaff in the New Testament reveals more about Jefferson than it does about Jesus. The "Jefferson Bible" is the outline of what Conkin calls Jefferson's "Jesus religion," but it cannot be regarded as a systematic or fair encapsulation of Jesus' ministry. Jefferson leaves out what might be called the righteous or dark side of Jesus (the withering of the fig tree, pronouncing vindictive justice on individuals or towns who did not welcome Jesus and his disciples). Jefferson never bothered to work out an integrated or even consistent theology. He was almost wholly immune to the spirituality of the Christian religion. His secular "Jesus religion" may have been useful to his own secularist spirit, but it did not account for the profound and deeply personal influence Christianity has had on countless generations of serious women and men. In other words, it would perhaps have been more intelligent for Barton to write a critique of Jefferson's religious amateurism than to try to prove that he was a traditional Christian who was not a secularist. It might have been a better strategy to wonder why Jefferson's intensely personal religious views are still regarded as worthy of respect, rather than to twist them into a quasi-orthodoxy that they clearly do not embrace. Barton is just the last of a long line of people who are smitten with Jefferson and either celebrate his animadversions on traditional Christianity or feel the need to explain them away. The most intelligent strategy is simply to let Jefferson be Jefferson and to relegate his religious views to a particular moment in the Enlightenment, the work of a man of a particularly impoverished spiritual outlook.

Although Jefferson would certainly feel humiliated to be at the center of a controversy about his private religious views of two centuries ago, and though he would feel nothing but contempt for David Barton, whom he might class with the evangelical "cuttlefish" and "insects" he decried through the course of his long life, Jefferson would be the first to defend Barton's right to publish any nonsense he pleases. In the preamble to the Virginia Statute for Religious Liberty, Jefferson wrote,

"Truth is great, and will prevail if left to herself, that she is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error, and has nothing to fear from the conflict, unless by human interposition disarmed of her natural weapons free argument and debate, errors ceasing to be dangerous when it is permitted freely to contradict them."

In Jefferson's free marketplace of ideas, David Barton's wild and erroneous claims are unlikely to convince anyone except those who cling tenaciously to the notion that the Founding Fathers intended the United States to be an overtly Christian nation. It may be that they are beyond reason. Their numbers are growing. Books like The Jefferson Lies merely strengthen their cocksure mythology about American life, and deepen their paranoia about the "agenda" of the "academic collectivists." But Jefferson never despaired of the capacity of truth to defeat error, fact superstition, and good sense nonsense as long as it remains possible to engage in a fair contest of ideas. As Jefferson put it to his favorite Grandson Thomas Jefferson Randolph,

"When I hear another express an opinion which is not mine, I say to myself, He has a right to his opinion, as I to mine; why should I question it? His error does me no injury, and shall I become a Don Quixote, to bring all men by force of argument to one opinion? If a fact be misstated, it is probable he is gratified by a belief of it, and I have no right to deprive him of the gratification. If he wants information, he will ask it, and then I will give it in measured terms; but if he still believes his own story, and shows a desire to dispute the fact with me, I hear him and say nothing. It is his affair, not mine, if he prefers error."

These words were written on November 24, 1808.

Needless to say, they are not cited by David Barton.

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Christmas 1804

Excerpt from
The Character of Meriwether Lewis:
Explorer in the Wilderness
by Clay S. Jenkinson

From chapter three:
"Birthdays, Holidays, Anniversaries"

Christmas 1804

The best Christmas of the expedition occurred at Fort Mandan, where Lewis and Clark spent a total of 146 nights. The Mandan leader Sheheke-shote had made good on his November 1, 1804, promise, "[I]f we eat you Shall eat, if we Starve you must Starve also." In their Estimate of the Eastern Indians, Lewis and Clark singled out the Mandan for special praise: "These are the most friendly, well disposed Indians inhabiting the Missouri. They are brave, humane and hospitable."

Construction of the fort had begun on November 3, 1804. The two ranges of living quarters were ready to be roofed by November 11. The captains moved into their quarters on November 13. Sensing the severity of the winter that was about to envelop the northern Great Plains, the men worked until 1 A.M. on November 15-16 in an attempt to finish the living quarters, and on November 16, "all the men move into the huts which is not finsihd," Clark reported. The huts were not completely roofed until November 27. Work on the security pickets had begun on or slightly before December 20, and was completed on Christmas Eve. Somehow the Corps of Discovery always managed to complete its winter forts just in time for Christmas.

For all the secularity of the expedition, and its status as a military endeavor, Christmas at Fort Mandan had something of the feel of a scene out of a Laura Ingalls Wilder novel. Patrick Gass reported that on Christmas Eve, "Flour, dried apples, pepper and other articles were distributed in the different messes to enable them to celebrate Christmas in a proper and social manner." These precious items had traveled in the larder of the expedition for 1,610 river miles under conditions that must have compromised their integrity again and again. The flour, pepper, and apples were at least seven months old. It would be interesting to know when the men of the expedition had last tasted flour or apples. It was an act of extraordinary leadership and generosity of spirit for the captains to do what they could to make Christmas special at the far northwestern outpost of American civilization just as the men completed Fort Mandan. At some point between May and late December 1804, probably later rather than sooner, the captains must have discussed Christmas and determined how to celebrate the traditional holiday, if at all. It's hard to think of Lewis leading that discussion. Once they decided to observe Christmas, the captains must have gone through a mental checklist of just what they had left to distribute that was not already part of their regular mess routine. They settled on flour, pepper, dried apples, and what might be called the special reserve supply of spirits. These luxury items were more than just Christmas treats. They were precious tokens of civilization offered to exhausted and homesick men, deep in the wilderness, hundreds of miles from any possibility of resupply. Native Americans had known how to grind corn meal for centuries, of course, but no wheat had ever been grown in America before the Columbian exchange. Crab apples were ubiquitous in the temperate zones of North America, but large domesticated apples of the kind we take for granted would have existed only as far west as St. Louis and the villages that clustered near the mouth of the Missouri River. Several hundred years before the journey of Lewis and Clark, pepper—now so common as to be wholly unremarkable—had been one of the catalysts for the discovery of North America. The humble Christmas meal at Fort Mandan was not quite, as Lewis later put it, "the repast that the hand of civilization" might have prepared, but it was in its own way more impressive. It was a repast that the hand of civilization could carry more than 1,500 miles up the Missouri River under very unstable traveling conditions in a leaky vessel manned by almost fifty voraciously hungry young men. Even though Lewis and Clark were on the far edge of the known world on Christmas 1804, they had brought a few items from the known world with them. It could not have failed to hearten everyone who was present that day. The Lewis and Clark Expedition was a military mission, but it was also more than that. It was already a traveling community, and it would become—at certain times and in some limited respects—what even Lewis came to call "the best [of] families."

At this point in the journey, there was still an abundance of alcohol. Gass wrote, "Captain Clarke . . . presented to each man a glass of brandy, and we hoisted the American flag in the garrison, and its first waving in fort Mandan was celebrated with another glass.—" The fort was now complete, everyone was healthy, the Mandan and Hidatsa Indians were friendly, food was abundant, and the Corps of Discovery was wintering in a dry—if appallingly cold—climate. "The men then cleared out one of the rooms and commenced dancing," Gass wrote. It was a mild winter day on the northern Great Plains. The captains recorded that it was 15 degrees above zero Fahrenheit at sunrise, snow falling, but a balmy 20 degrees above at 4 P.M., no longer snowing but cloudy. Assuming that the wind was not fierce, this was a great winter day, not quite warm enough to hold the dance outside, but balmy enough to enable the men to wander about the Fort Mandan compound quite comfortably during the course of the day. Clark, for example, noted that some of the men "went out to hunt." Two weeks earlier the temperature had been so cold that Clark did "not think it prudent to turn out to hunt in Such Cold weather, or at least untill our Consts. are prepared to under go this Climate." Consts. = physical constitutions.

"At 10 o'clock," Gass reported, "we had another glass of brandy, and at 1 a gun was fired as a signal for dinner. At half past 2, another gun was fired, as a notice to assemble at the dance, which was continued in a jovial manner till 8 at night."

Gass noted that the joviality of the dance was diminished by the absence of ladies. It was Gass who paused, at the end of the Fort Mandan winter, to tantalize his readers with an invocation of the conventions of epic romance. "[S]ome readers will perhaps expect," he wrote on April 5, 1805, that, "we ought to be prepared now, when we are about to renew our voyage, to give some account of the fair sex of the Missouri; and entertain them with narratives of feats of love as well as of arms." Gass, or his editor David McKeehan, may have been thinking of the opening books of Vergils Aeneid, in which the hero Aeneas almost forgets his mission and his destiny when he encounters the Carthaginian queen Dido, who is everything he desires, but not what he needs, in a woman. Gass made it clear that he could provide his readers such titillation if he wished to, but then retreated behind the high seriousness of the Enlightenment. "Though we could furnish a sufficient number of entertaining stories and pleasant anecdotes, we do not think it prudent to swell our Journal with them; as our views are directed to more useful information." On Christmas, however, Gass lamented that the men were "without the presence of any females, except three squaws, wives to our interpreter, who took no other part than the amusement of looking on." Whitehouse reported that the Indian women "took no part with us only to look on." The three women were almost certainly Rene Jusseaume's Mandan wife, who later made the long journey to Washington, DC, to meet President Jefferson; and Toussaint Charbonneau's two wives, both Shoshone, one named Otter Woman and the other, of course, the famous Sacagawea. It is amusing, as Lewis might put it, to imagine this Christmas scene. One of the 12x14 foot rooms of Fort Mandan cleared out so that the men could dance. Somewhere in the corner of the room at least one of the fiddlers, probably Pierre Cruzatte. Whitehouse said that both fiddlers played, and though he did not mention them, he surely meant Cruzatte and George Gibson. He may have been exaggerating when he said the expedition had "Two Violins & plenty of Musicians." When Bernard DeVoto later imagined this scene, he envisioned "the voyageur Cruzatte, a mighty waterman, who played this irrecoverable Christmas music on a fiddle, while the fires blazed and the north wind howled round the fort. Boating songs, probably, and minuets and carols that had crossed the Atlantic to New France and traveled the rivers for two centuries, to be song never more incongruously than at the Mandan villages."

It is hard to imagine that more than a fraction of the men could have crowded into the dance room at any one time. The three Indian women must have been tucked away along one of the walls. Sacagawea was seven and a half months pregnant. Just what they thought of this holiday and alcohol-heightened conviviality, the white folks' big medicine day, is not recorded, but this simple tableau is one of those little known but priceless glimpses into the inner workings of the Lewis and Clark Expedition. "None of the natives came to the garrison this day; the commanding officers having requested they should not, which was strictly attended to," Gass wrote. John Ordway explained their request by way of one of the few religious references in the expedition's journals. "[T]he Savages did not Trouble us," he wrote, "as we had requested them not to come as it was a Great medician day with us." Ordway's account ends with a sentence worthy of Charles Dickens: "[W]e enjoyed a merry cristmas dureing the day & evening untill nine oClock—all in peace & quietness." Ordway emerges in the journals as a thoughtful and decent man, with an understated but clear sense of respect and filial piety.

Dickens, by the way, had not been born in 1805—he made his appearance in 1812, when John Ordway was trying to pick up the shattered pieces of his life in the wake of the gargantuan New Madrid earthquake. The author of A Christmas Carol (1843) and the marvelous Christmas episode in the Pickwick Papers (1836-37) would develop a long and fascinating relationship with America. Dickens visited America twice, once from January 22 to June 7, 1842, and again from November 19, 1867 to April 22, 1868. On the second trip, Dickens ventured as far west as St. Louis. By then William Clark had been dead for twenty-nine years. Britain's greatest novelist did not like America or its brash and restless citizens. "I do not know the American gentleman," Dickens once famously quipped. "God forgive me for putting two such words together."

Joseph Whitehouse insisted that the special issue of alcohol was brandy not whiskey. He reported that the day began at 7 A.M. with a volley of small arms and the "discharge of our Swivels." At 1 P.M., "our Cannon was fir'd off, as a signal for dinner," and at 2:30 P.M. "we fired off our Cannon, and repaired to the Room to dance." Lots of ordinance on the white folks' big medicine day. One wonders what the Mandan people concluded.

Such was Christmas 1804 at Fort Mandan. The journals of that day—written by Clark, John Ordway, Patrick Gass, and Joseph Whitehouse—are remarkable for what they mention, but even more remarkable for what they never mention. There is not a single reference in any journal to Meriwether Lewis. Clark said, "I was awakened before Day by a discharge of 3 platoons from the Party and the french. . . ." Not we, but I. "[T]he men merrily Disposed," Clark wrote, "I give them all a little Tafia." No mention of the expedition's commander. Ordway reported that "our officers Gave the party a drink of Taffee," but he made no specific mention of Lewis. Gass was more precise: "Captain Clarke then presented to each man a glass of brandy." Whitehouse concurred. In fact, Whitehouse implied that Clark emerged from the captains' quarters, but not his partner in discovery. "Captain Clark came out of his quarters, and presented a Glass of Brandy to each Man of our party." Later, "he presented them again with another Glass of brandy."

Where was Lewis? Did he spend the day alone in his hut? Did he appear in the morning with Clark, but hold back while Clark administered the gift of spirits? Did Lewis attend the dance? Did he take part in the Christmas feast? Did he greet the men at any point in the day? Even if Lewis was present at some or all of these activities, it is significant that the lesser journal keepers mentioned only Clark, not the actual leader of the expedition. We would give a great deal for Lewis's account of Christmas Day 1804. We would give even more to anyone who could provide a full account of Christmas 1804 with particular attention to the social dynamics of the day, a description of the religious rituals that took place, if any, an account of the conversations that transpired between the three Indian women as they watched all of this unfold, a report of the whereabouts and disposition of Charbonneau, and a summary of the actions and words of Meriwether Lewis, if he emerged from his quarters at all. We have a pretty full account of Christmas Day 1804 at Fort Mandan, but the journals that we have increase, rather than quench, our hunger for an authentic understanding of what really unfolded within the walls of Fort Mandan—on that and on many other occasions.

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A Message from Clay

Hello everyone, and welcome to the new and reworked Thomas Jefferson Hour website. If you have come to this site in the past you know that I'm not very good about keeping up with blog comments, etc. But we routinely post my weekly newspaper column from the Bismarck Tribune, and a range of other things that I work on.

It has been an amazing and exhausting year and its only May. I finished one book on Theodore Roosevelt in April. In fact, tomorrow I look at the page proofs in preparation for releasing it to the printing press. The other book is a massive study of Meriwether Lewis, which I am wrapping up this week. All that remain are a few cuts and clarifications, and footnotes. The footnotes will take a couple of days of very hard work, but I will get them done.

I'm leaving on Monday next for a two week cultural tour in Great Britain. We are sailing over on the Queen Mary. Then five days in Shakespeare's England. So I will be filling newspaper columns from abroad, if the digital world permits, and I will try to record some audio too. One of my onboard lectures is on the Founding Fathers and England, and in particular the trip Jefferson took with John Adams through the home counties of Britain in 1786.

Thanks for listening to the Jefferson Hour. As the world moves into what feels like a new dark ages, I think we need the clarifying and rational voice of Jefferson now more than ever. As America's greatest exemplar of the Enlightenment, Jefferson believed:

1. That the world is understandable.

2. That science teaches us about "Nature and Nature's God," and that invariably gives us the right path as we address the problems of life.

3. That humans are capable of reason and should strive to be rational at all times.

4. That while we cannot achieve a utopia of perfect equality, we can move a great distance in that direction if we dedicate our culture to the ideals of life rather than to protecting property and privilege.

5. That governments exist to fulfill the will of the people, not privileged minorities, or a self-appointed aristocracy of money or merit.

6. That life is to a very large degree perfectible, if we will only educate our children up to their capacity, and imbue them with critical thinking skills.

Those are my principles too. That's why I perform as Thomas Jefferson. I believe that the United States would be almost infinitely better off if we pursued Jeffersonian values and backed away from Hamiltonian ones (or worse). The voice of Jefferson is almost entirely lost in our time. My goal is to help keep alive what Jefferson called "that sacred fire" in any way I can, however small the impact.

Keep listening.

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