Free American Sphinx by Joseph J. Ellis

worldly imperfections as the world’s problem rather than his own.
    Jefferson’s strange attachment, then, to the myth of the Saxon past was an early ideological manifestation of a characteristically Jeffersonian cast of mind. It represented his discovery—in truth, his invention—of an idyllic time and place that accorded with his powerful sense of the way things were meant to be. And any compromise of that seductive vision was a betrayal of one’s personal principles. Back there in the faraway world of pre-Norman England, prior to the feudal corruptions, men and women had found it possible to combine individual independence and social harmony, personal freedom and the rule of law, the need to work and the urge to play. Throughout his life Jefferson was haunted by the prospects of such a paradise and eager to find it in bucolic pastoral scenes, distant Indian tribes, well-ordered gardens, local communities (he later called them ward-republics) or new and therefore uncorrupted generations. At the private level the young man who was taking his seat in the Continental Congress had already begun to build his personal version of utopia at Monticello. At the public level he was preparing to release his formidable energies against a British government that, as he saw it, was threatening to disrupt and destroy the patch of potential perfection that was forming on the western edge of the British Empire. Whatever weaknesses this Jeffersonian perspective harbored as a mature and realistic appraisal of the Anglo-American crisis, it possessed all the compensating advantages of an unequivocal moral commitment driven by an unsullied sense of righteous indignation. 23
    PROSE ORATIONS
    S UCH ASSETS were not immediately visible to his colleagues in the Continental Congress. We know, with the advantage of hindsight, that Jefferson was destined to emerge in the history books as the most famous figure in Philadelphia in 1776. In the summer of 1775, however, while his authorship of
Summary View
provided a measure of status and his membership in the Virginia delegation assured that his opinions mattered, no one could have predicted that his contribution over the course of the next year would earn him a permanent place in posterity. Not only was he a thoroughly marginal player within Virginia’s cast of stars, he lacked precisely those qualities that the members of Congress considered most essential. His most glaring deficiency was the talent most valued in Philadelphia: He could not speak in public.
    This was a major liability because the Continental Congress was regarded by most observers as an arena for orators. John Adams, who has left the fullest personal account of the debates and deliberations, had come to Philadelphia the previous year wondering who would be the American Cicero or Demosthenes (and hoping the fates had selected him for both roles). His diary entries convey something of the sense that pervaded the debates, the sense that as each man rose to speak, he was being judged by his colleagues as a contestant in a game of conspicuous eloquence. Adams observed that Edward Rutledge of South Carolina was “sprightly but not deep” and had the distracting habit of speaking through his nose. Benjamin Rush of Pennsylvania was dismissed as “too much of a talker. . . . Elegant but not deep.” Roger Sherman of Connecticut was a perfect model of awkwardness: “There cannot be a more striking contrast to beautiful Action, than the Motions of his Hands. Generally, he stands upright with his Hands before him. . . . But when he moves a Hand, in any thing like Action, Hogarth’s Genius could not have invented a Motion more opposite to grace. It is Stiffness, and Awkwardness itself. Awkward as a Junior Bachelor, or a Sophomore.” By the time Jefferson arrived in Philadelphia Adams himself had begun to emerge as one of the most effective public speakers in the Congress, a man whose own throbbing ego had lashed itself to the cause of