There are signs that Americans are finally warming up to the country’s semiquincentennial, and there’s a tantalizing array of events nationwide over the next month. (We can’t be the only folks excited about a tall ships parade!) Alongside the outdoor fun, though, there’s a glut of articles and books considering the ideals of the American revolution and the men behind them. Given how much is out there on the great men who founded America (including Jonathan Horn’s Free Press newsletter, This Week in American History), we thought we’d try something a little different for our final countdown to the country’s big birthday. This month, we’re taking a break from the Founders to celebrate some of the Americans the revolution enabled over the last 250 years.
The idea is not to downplay the brilliance of the names that you usually see on a list of Great Americans. It is to acknowledge a few names that are less familiar, but nonetheless helped make this country what it is. Did the inventor of air conditioning, Willis Carrier, not have as profound an effect on the country as anyone who, like Mr. Smith, went to Washington? So, while we will continue to revere Lincoln and Washington, it’s time for a little love to Sandy Koufax, Louis Armstrong, and John Steinbeck.
We’re not trying to come up with a definitive list of the greatest Americans who ever lived. We’re offering something more personal: a writer we love on an American they love. Every weekday between now and July 4.
To kick things off, we’re allowing ourselves one essay on one of the great men who founded this country: the historian Jane Kamensky, president and CEO of Monticello, on Thomas Jefferson’s misgivings about over-reverence for the Founding generation. Read Kamensky’s piece below, and then look out for our series on Great Americans starting in The Front Page tomorrow. —The Editors
By 1826, Thomas Jefferson knew his sun was setting. He turned 83 in April, rheumatic, dyspeptic, and fever-racked. The letters he wrote that year—169 of which survive—are haunted by debt and by death. “I must meet what futurity has in reserve for me,” Jefferson told his grandson Francis Eppes in March.
A week later, he wrote his will. Around the same time, he designed his tombstone. It was to be a simple obelisk six feet tall—less than his own human height—and feature an epitaph listing three accomplishments curated from four decades in public service “& not a word more.” Posterity would see him claim credit for the American Declaration of Independence, that avatar of self-government; for Virginia’s Statute for Religious Freedom, an originary statement of freedom of conscience; and for the University of Virginia, a beacon of citizen education. Author, Jefferson called himself in the inscription, and Father. Not founder, much less Founder. Across the vast course of his correspondence, Jefferson used that f-word just a handful of times, most often to talk about the working of iron.
As he mused on his own ending in 1826, Jefferson was also keenly aware that the Declaration of Independence, whose drafting he had come to count as his greatest contribution to the nation and indeed to the world, was approaching the ripe age of 50. For some time, he had kept track of the dwindling number of its living signers: In 1812, he thought there were seven, as he tallied for John Adams. A year later, he counted four, or possibly six. “I am the only one South of the Potomac,” Jefferson supposed. In his last public letter, penned on June 24, 1826, Jefferson described the pride he felt as “one of the surviving signers of an instrument, pregnant with our own, and the fate of the world.” There were then only three. On July 5, the day after Jefferson and John Adams both perished, only Charles Carroll of Maryland endured.
It had long been the ideals, not the author, which Jefferson wanted Americans to revere. “I have declined letting my own birthday be known, & have engaged my family not to communicate it,” he had written in 1803, toward the end of his first term as president. He felt “disapproving” of any attempt to transfer “the honours & veneration for the great birthday of our republic, to any individual, or of dividing them with individuals.”
