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The Long Affair: Thomas Jefferson and the French Revolution, 1785-1800

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O'Brien provides an interesting, readable and persuasive account of Jefferson's relations with the French Revolution and his views on slavery. Jefferson comes across as a distinctly mixed character, but an interesting one.

Reading the early parts of the book, my main reservation was that the author, having created plausible hypotheses, tended to thereafter treat them as facts. It's hard to avoid doing that when explaining historical events, in particular the apparent contradictions between Jefferson's stated views and his actual policies with regard to both the French Revolution and slavery. The problem for the reader who is not already an expert in the history--and I am not--is that he has no way of knowing how much the author has selected his facts to fit his theories.

As long as he was dealing with the late 18th and early 19th centuries, I found O'Brien convincing. When, at the end, he switched to talking about late 20th century America, on the other hand, he came across as presenting the sort of distorted picture that requires the combination of political bias and massive ignorance. He appears to believe that the major opposition to conventional liberalism in the U.S. is a right wing white racist movement which he occasionally describes as "libertarian" and identifies with Timothy McVeigh and the Militia movement. While he thinks that movement will probably lose out over the next century, he isn't sure.

Somewhere he refers to militias as having tens of thousands of members. It doesn't seem to occur to him that that figure, if true, amounts to about one American in ten thousand. And he greatly overestimates the central role of racial issues in American political discourse, perhaps in part because doing so provides a tie-in to Jefferson, perhaps in part because he cannot imagine any other reasons why those identified as on the right might be critical of late twentieth century American liberalism.

All that being said, I'm glad I read the book, and I think I know more about the early years of the U.S. as a result of doing so.

Conor Cruise O'Brien has here given us an extremely interesting, if troubling, book on Jefferson's views on the French Revolution and slavery. In a nutshell, O'Brien has two charges against Jefferson to bring: first, he believes that Jefferson's support of the French Revolution was for the most part sincere, but convenient. Secondly, and most provocatively, O'Brien not only argues that our third president was a racist, not merely when judged by exacting late Twentieth Century standards, but when judged by Eighteenth Century Virginian standards. And that when white extremists claim to be his genuine heirs, they are not entirely wrong! An extraordinary charge, given the general view of Jefferson as the most 'liberal' and progressive of the Founders. A charge to which we will return momentarily.

But first, Mr. O'Brien's discussion of Jefferson and the French Revolution runs something like this: Slaveholders of the American South were being attacked and ridiculed, not only by their rivals in the northern states but by the French and English, for their hypocrisy. It was this combination of embarrassment about slavery and political struggle with the Federalists that led Jefferson and most of the South to answer their enemies by the amazing stratagem of virtually unconditional support of the French Revolution.

I say amazing, though ingenious comes to mind, because at first blush it would seem that support of the French Revolution would mean support of her humanitarian principles. But Jefferson, the South, and the Republicans needed political support from voters in the North, they needed a unifying theme to counterbalance the particularism and divisiveness of slavery. Their policy of fervent public support for the French Revolution did that very well indeed. Jefferson's party was to successively place three men, himself, Madison and Monroe, in the presidency in the first two decades of the nineteenth century.

But I honestly find the whole discussion of Jefferson's maneuvers, and O'Briens purported shock at them, disingenuous and unconvincing. Imagine! Politicians playing at Politics!!! If anything, we end up impressed by the political acumen of Jefferson and the Republicans. Not only did they make so many people forget that so many of their leaders were slaveowning patricians, but they were able to saddle the Federalists, within a generation of the Revolutionary War, with the defense of the hated British Empire! What I did find deeply disturbing, however, was O'Briens discussion of Jefferson's views of slavery.

What O'Brien tries to show, and I think very much succeeds in showing is, first, that Jefferson's reputation as the outstanding liberal of his generation is sentimental nonsense. Not only did he never seriously consider any practical way of ending the slave/plantation system, but he was among its most ardent defenders. In his beloved Virginia, around the time of his Declaration, he was a member of a committee chosen to revise, modernize and codify the statutes of Virginia, including laws dealing with slaves. Among the enlightened additions to the law that came out of this committee were that no free blacks would be allowed to emigrate into Virginia, though God only knows why they would want to, and any white woman having a child of a black man would have to leave the state! Thus spoke the author of the Declaration of Independence.

Later, during a slave revolt in the French colony Saint Dominique (Haiti), Jefferson behaved in an equally abominable fashion. He sweats blood over the sufferings of the former masters, gone into penurious exile, "Never was so deep a tragedy presented to the feelings of man"! But as to the recently self-emancipated slaves, our third president advises the French, in the person of Louis A. Pichon (the Charge d' Affairs) to reduce Toussaint [the Haitian leader] to starvation after making peace, and in collusion, with England! In other words, Jefferson advises France to abandon the Revolution and Revolutionary Principles because there are free black in the Caribbean! During his second administration, after the failure of the French to retake the island, he imposed an embargo on the Haitians...

Jeffersonians are forever drawing our attention to the words, the magnificent words, on the Jefferson Memorial: "Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that his justice cannot sleep forever. Commerce between master and slave is despotism. Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people are to be free." But O'Brien wonders, as do we, about the words that follow those quoted above. Can the man who, in his Autobiography, wrote "Nor is it less certain that the two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government. Native habit, opinion has drawn indelible lines of distinction between them", still be an unquestionable monument in our multi-cultural society?

Why this spiteful, evil, resentful hatred of the slaves (indeed, all black people) who toiled so endlessly for him? Those of us alive today in the United States have little understanding of slavery, having never lived under it, whether as masters or slaves. Perhaps if we were to compare modern slavery with ancient slavery we could shed some more light on the institution of slavery.

Jefferson, Virginians, and other modern slaveowners, were mightily given over to the conceit of comparing themselves to ancient slaveholders. After all, if such paragons of virtue and principle like Brutus and Cato could own slaves, what could be essentially wrong with the "peculiar institution"? This argument is, to be honest, idiotic. Just because Cato is politically incorruptible, an icon (in his own time!) in the resistance to Caesar, does not mean that everything he does is magnificent or beyond reproach. If this were so he would have been able to put together a coalition to thwart Caesar long before Caesar crossed the Rubicon.

The comparison of ancient and modern slavery, however, is interesting. Is there anything that sets them apart? Why did (some) slaves in antiquity rise to such 'recognized' preeminence in science, humanities, or the arts, while this was so rare, as to be nonexistent, in Jefferson's Virginia, the rest of the American South, or, to a lesser extent, Brazil and Haiti? Jefferson himself observes that some ancient slaves excelled in science, insomuch as to be usually employed as tutors to their masters' children. Characteristically, he points out that these slaves, of the Greeks and Romans, "were of the race of whites." Thus it would seem that it is the psuedo-scientific notion of race is what separates ancient and modern forms of slavery. Unfortunately, in the limited space that Amazon allows, this topic must await another review.

In closing I want to say that I don't believe that Jefferson was a premature Nazi, and neither does Mr. O'Brien. But Jefferson's speculations and his actions have given credence to lunatics like Timothy McVeigh claiming our Third President as their hero. These facts should lead us not to the contemptuous dismissal of Jefferson, which is what he did to black people, but rather admiration for what was genuinely admirable in the man, and contempt for what was contemptible.

This is, quite simply, one of the most important books ever written about Jefferson. It redresses the terrible imbalance created by American historians who think of the Founding Fathers as the Twelve Apostles re-incarnated. Critics of the book should understand that O'Brien is a world-class scholar.

When O'Brien published "The Long Affair," about Thomas Jefferson and his peculiar admiration for the bloody excesses of the French Revolution, the Sage for Archer Daniels Midland (aka George Will) went into a word-strewn fit over the book. I think Will's excesses speak to the quality of most criticism of the book.

Perhaps, the single thing about the book that most upset George was O'Brien's comparison of a statement of Jefferson's to something Pol Pot might have said. Jefferson wrote in 1793, at the height of the Terror, "...but rather than it [the French Revolution] should have failed, I would have seen half the earth desolated. Were there but an Adam and Eve left in every country, and left free, it would be better than as it now is." George wrote off Jefferson's brutal statement as "epistolary extravagance," and attacked O'Brien for using slim evidence for an extreme conclusion about an American "hero."

George went so far as favorably to compare the work of Ken Burns with that of O'Brien, calling Burns "an irrigator of our capacity for political admiration," as compared to one who "panders" to "leave our national memory parched."

I mean no disparagement of Ken Burns, but he produces the television equivalent of coffee-table books. O'Brien is a scholar, the author of many serious books. The very comparison, even without the odd language, tells us something about George.

But language, too, is important. The irony is that George's own words, "irrigator of our capacity for political admiration," sound frighteningly like what we'd expect to hear from the Ministry of Culture in some ghastly place (dare I write it?) such as Pol Pot's Cambodia.

But George should have known better. This letter of Jefferson's is utterly characteristic of views he expressed many different ways. Jefferson quite blithely wrote that America's Constitution would not be adequate to defend what he called liberty, that there would have to be a new revolution every 15 or 20 years, and that the tree of liberty needed to be nourished regularly with a fresh supply of patriot blood.

Jefferson's well-known sentimental view of the merits of sturdy yeomen farmers as citizens of a republic and his intense dislike for industry and urbanization bear an uncanny resemblance to Pol Pot's beliefs. Throwing people out of cities to become honorable peasants back on the land, even those who never saw a farm, was precisely how Pol Pot managed to kill at least a million people in Cambodia.

What is it about many of those on the right relishing the deaths of others in the name of ideology? You see, much like the "chickenhawks" now running Washington, sending others off to die, Jefferson never lifted a musket during the Revolution. While serving as governor of Virginia, he set a pathetic example of supporting the war's desperate material needs. He also gave us a comic-opera episode of dropping everything and running feverishly away from approaching British troops in Virginia (there was an official inquiry over the episode). Jefferson turned down his first diplomatic appointment to Europe by the new government out of fear of being captured by British warships, a fear that influenced neither Benjamin Franklin nor John Adams.

But real heroes aren't always, or even usually, soldiers. Jefferson, despite a long and successful career and a legacy of fine words (expressing thoughts largely cribbed from European writers), cannot be credited with any significant personal sacrifice over matters of principle during his life. He wouldn't give up luxury despite his words about slavery. He never risked a serious clash with the Virginia Establishment over slave laws during his rise in state politics. And in his draft of the Declaration of Independence, he lamely and at length blamed the king of England for the slave trade, yet, when he wrote the words, it was actually in his interest to slow the trade and protect the value of his existing human holdings.

Unlike Mr. Lincoln later, who had none of his advantages of education and good social contacts, Jefferson did not do well as a lawyer. He never earned enough to pay his own way, his thirst for luxury far outstripping even the capacity of his many high government positions and large number of slaves to generate wealth. Again, unlike Mr. Lincoln, Jefferson was not especially conscientious about owing people money, and he frequently continued buying luxuries like silver buckles and fine carriages while he still owed substantial sums.

Jefferson spent most of his productive years in government service, yet he never stopped railing against the evils of government. There's more than a passing resemblance here to the empty slogans of government-service lifers like Bob Dole and Newt Gingrich who enjoy their government pensions and benefits even as they still complain about government. Jefferson's most famous quote praises the least possible government, yet, as President, he brought a virtual reign of terror to New England with his attempts to enforce an embargo against England (the "Anglomen" as this very prejudiced man typically called the English).

Jefferson, besides having some truly ridiculous beliefs, like those about the evils of central banks or the health efficacy of soaking your feet in ice water every morning, definitely had a very dark side. Any of his political opponents would readily have testified to this. Jefferson was the American Machiavelli.

It was this side of him that put Philip Freneau on the federal payroll in order to subsidize the man's libelous newspaper attacks on Washington's government - this while Jefferson served in that very government. At another point, Jefferson hired James Callender to dig up and write filth about political opponents, an effort which backfired when Callender turned on Jefferson for not fulfilling promises. Callender famously dug out and publicized the story about Sally Hemings, Jefferson's slave-mistress, his late wife's illegitimate half-sister (slavery made for some amazing family relationships), a story we now know almost certainly to be true (by the way, dates point to Sally's beginning to serve Jefferson in this capacity at 13 or 14 years old). It was this dark side of Jefferson that resulted in a ruthless, years-long vendetta against Aaron Burr for the sin of appearing to challenge Jefferson's election to the presidency.

Jefferson expressed himself in embarrassingly clear terms about his belief in black inferiority. And it is important to note that in doing so, he violated one of his basic principles of remaining skeptical and not accepting what was not proved, so this, clearly, was something he believed deeply. There is also reliable evidence that on one occasion he was observed by a visitor beating a slave, quite contradicting Jefferson's public-relations pretensions to saintly paternalism.

When Napoleon sent an army attempting to subdue the slaves who had revolted and formed a republic on what is now Haiti, President Jefferson gave his full consent and support to the bloody (and unsuccessful) effort.

Hero? I have no idea how George Will defines the word, but by any meaningful standard, Jefferson utterly fails.

Read the book, and decide for yourself.

Having much respected O'Brien's writings on Irish history, I was thoroughly looking forward to his take on Thomas Jefferson. Was Jefferson a secret supporter of the Great Terror of the French revolution? Sadly, this is not a biography so much as it is a hatchet job. Jefferson was no saint. So what? Saints don't make for interesting lives anyway. But most of O'Brien's attacks are not substantiated; they're of the "this is the opinion I formed the other day while shaving" variety. This unremitting character assassination -- screed may be a better word -- is not worth the paper it is printed on.

When Conor Cruise ("The Cruiser") O'Brien, Irish parliamentarian,perennial TV talk show guest, "visiting scholar" to innumerable universities, and international consumer of fellowships and grants decides to take a whack at the underpinnings of the American Miracle, one expects it will be a mighty whack indeed.

O'Brien does not disappoint with the "Long Affair", as he levels his considerable academic artillery at none other than Thomas Jefferson.

He claims that previous Jefferson biographers have distorted Jefferson's image - for the better - by omitting portions of the
subject's writings. In documenting this claim, O'Brien reproduces all the correspondence in question and more than makes his point.

A vestigial appendage of the Leftist movement of the sixties and seventies, O'Brien makes no effort to hide his intense dislike of Jefferson the slave-owner, as he works to stomp the bejasus out of a reputation that has endured for more than 170 years.

Judging Jefferson's positive attitude toward France during the French Revolution as condemnable, O'Brien finds Jefferson "in the grip of a fanatical cult of liberty". He goes completely over the top when he offers Jefferson as the ideological father of the Ku Klux Klan and describes fans of Jefferson as "radical, violent, anti-federal, libertarian fanatics: paranoid conspirators against whose grasp President Clinton is rightly resolved to defend 'our sacred symbols'".

There is a type of academic that cannot tolerate the glories of the American Experiment in personal liberty and fears the concept of the primacy of the individual over the state. Conor Cruise O'Brien is, and always has been, such a creature.

This stimulating biography offers a list of illustrations, preface, acknowledgments, prelude, epilogue, appendix, notes, sources,and index.

While researching Edmund Burke and the French Revolution, this book offered wonderful and unique insights into the debate through the eyes of Thomas Jefferson during the heat of the French Revolution (and even some things I did not know about Burke). Instead of just giving a personal interpretation, O'Brien relies heavily on primary sources, letting the reader read what the particular person had to say instead of summarizing (or as some authors do, reinterpreting). This book is essential to understanding either Jefferson or the French Revolution.

Jefferson is one of the most revered fathers of the United States.
His sphinx-like profile, while showing some fissure, can still command today great reverence. Most of biographies about him underline the romantic-like élan and the inspiring vision that constitute his legacy, while alluding marginally and with benign neglect to the many inconsistencies that characterize his life.

I happened to read this essay, shortly after "American Sphinx" by J.J Ellis: the leaflet on the book promised to mount an indictment of Jefferson's ideal heritage, and the credential of the writer, a former UN official, were flawless. I must admit that the book did exceed the most optimistic expectation.

While I cannot agree completely with the indictment and the conclusion (the threat posed by Jefferson legacy to American Civil religion), I did greatly enjoy this reading. It demands respect for the quantity of the documents scrutinized, for the careful philological method used to interpret them, for the sharp logic used in building up the case and for the careful balancing and evaluation of different perspectives.

This is a detailed analysis of the political thought of Thomas Jefferson.Not a personal attack to the man: private life and biography enter only when it may be of help in understanding the development of his political ideas. The indictment is focused especially in the exposing of the grand smoke-screen that revolutionary rhetoric offered him to resist the more liberal attitudes of others revolutionary leading figures. In other words Jefferson, more or less knowingly, appropriated of the grand ideals of the Revolution not to further a new order but to rescue the conservative attitudes of the South and in this attempt he helped to create a dangerous compromise, responsible for the Civil War and still present - under different aspects - in the American political thought. This divorce between action and thought permits to account for the apparently "mistakes" of the man Jefferson: his lenient judgement of the French revolution - even in the most bloodied hours of the Terror, his attitudes towards slavery, his many slips both in private life and in the political arena. And that same obscurity is responsible for the romantic aura that still surrounds his myth.

A weakness of the book is that is often very "dry" in style: terse, but a bit too concise and uninspiring.This is possibly caused by a rather excessive focusing on the main theme: everything has been developed as in an effort to economy. Biography is almost reduced to mere facts and - as I told before - enters only when that can help to understand Jefferson's political ideas, the Enlightenment ideals and the revolution are narrowed to the theme considered (it is not even mentioned the famous letter about "whether one generation of men has a right to bind another") and there's almost no attempt to psychological analysis. The force of Logic supersedes Rhetoric. Possibly this is a voluntary effort to expose Jefferson's rhetoric in the name of hard substance, but none the less I believe the book could be much more pleasant with some touch of colour.

Possibly a lesser fault is also the neglect in analysing the Jefferson role and place in the European Society of the Ancient Regime.After all Jefferson (with Franklin and maybe more than Franklin) was one of the most "European" of the revolutionary leaders. He denied often the links, he showed to despise the European models, and yet he still is a leading figure in pre-revolutionary France (he was friend with Lafayette, with Condorcet, with the salon of madame Helvetius) and his ideas can be best explained on the light of the European pre-romantic movement, with all the emphasis on contrast between heart-purity-uncorrupted nature-individual versus mind-civilities-corruption of progress-society.An analysis of this attitudes could have cast light on the "divorce" of the ideal man (the Jefferson thinker-philosopher) from the actual man (the Jefferson slave owner and cunning political man), a divorce that is typical of many - if not most - European pre-romantics (Rousseau, but also the first Goethe).

While much has been written about the debt to British and Scottish Enlightenment, as far as I know, it seems a balanced assessment of the mutual debt of European pre-revolutionary society and American Revolutionary Thought is still lacking.And yet in Paris we can observe a great turmoil of ideas - in which American intellectuals have a leading role: Franklin and Jefferson, of course, but also Adams, Jay, Paine,... A closer look to that vanished world of late Enlightenment of Literary Salons, Masonic lodges, Enlightened Monarchs and rebel Intellectuals could help to rewrite history and understand many of its inconsistencies.

When Conor Cruise ("The Cruiser") O'Brien, Irish parliamentarian,perennial TV talk show guest, "visiting scholar" to innumerable universities, and international consumer of fellowships and grants decides to take a whack at the underpinnings of the American Miracle, one expects it will be a mighty whack indeed.

O'Brien does not disappoint with the "Long Affair", as he levels his considerable academic artillery at none other than Thomas Jefferson.

He claims that previous Jefferson biographers have distorted Jefferson's image - for the better - by omitting portions of the
subject's writings. In documenting this claim, O'Brien reproduces all the correspondence in question and more than makes his point.

A vestigial appendage of the Leftist movement of the sixties and seventies, O'Brien makes no effort to hide his intense dislike of Jefferson the slave-owner, as he works to stomp the bejasus out of a reputation that has endured for more than 170 years.

Judging Jefferson's positive attitude toward France during the French Revolution as condemnable, O'Brien finds Jefferson "in the grip of a fanatical cult of liberty". He goes completely over the top when he offers Jefferson as the ideological father of the Ku Klux Klan and describes fans of Jefferson as "radical, violent, anti-federal, libertarian fanatics: paranoid conspirators against whose grasp President Clinton is rightly resolved to defend 'our sacred symbols'".

There is a type of academic that cannot tolerate the glories of the American Experiment in personal liberty and fears the concept of the primacy of the individual over the state. Conor Cruise O'Brien is, and always has been, such a creature.

This stimulating biography offers a list of illustrations, preface, acknowledgments, prelude, epilogue, appendix, notes, sources,and index.

More of the same soft nonsense from this Leftist hack. One thing we can be thankful for, however. At least this book is considerably shorter than the Burke work. The main point is that Jefferson was "racist". If by this the authro means that TJ didn't believe that blacks were equal to whites, then I dont see the problem. Only imbeciles blinded by their own ideological infatuation would believe such drivel. The only thing to be regretted is that our own time has seen such a mindless ideology become the zietgiest.

There are good books and bad books about the Revolution. This one is terrible. O'Brien goes on for 200 pages about Jefferson's support of the French Revolution (so what else is new?) before getting to his real point: Jefferson was a white supremacist because he didn't free his slaves and didn't support the revolution in Haiti. In O'Brien's drunken fantasy, there is something called the "American civil religion" which is going to split and Jefferson will become the patron saint of the white supremacist nutcases like those of Oklahoma City. (there, there, Con, put the bottle down and come to bed) It's a shame, because I recall that years ago O'Brien played a worthwhile--if strongly Anglophile--role in Irish politics. But now he has alighted on our shores to grind several of his European axes and savage a man who has seen worse and as ever emerges unbowed: a great, if complex, inconsistent and highly ambitious, father of our country. If you want to understand the many contradictions in Jefferson's writings and actions, simply read the essay on him in Professor Bailyn's "To Begin the World Anew". Twenty pages with more wisdom than any number of O'Brien's fulminations.