2010-07-04
Thomas Jefferson Wasn't Wearing Pants When He Wrote The Declaration of Independence
Let me say before all else that as I write this post, I am wearing a pair of jeans.
With that out of the way, today is Independence Day (also known as the 4th of July for those who don't know why they don't have to work on Monday). There are a lot of myths about this day and it's history that I would like to write about. For example, July 4th isn't actually the day of our nation's independence. July 4, 1776 was the day that the representatives of 12 of the colonies agreed to the wording of the Declaration of Independence (New York was the hold out). The Declaration wasn't signed until (most historians agree) August 2nd, 1776. I won't shatter all of your romanticized images of this holiday this year... but there is one vision I would like to challenge.
I'd like you to take a look at these two statues of Thomas Jefferson penning the Declaration of Independence. The first (with me inspecting Jefferson's work like my creepy high school Geometry teacher) is in Williamsburg, Virginia and the other in Chicago, Illinois. If these statues look familiar, it's because identical statues can be found across the United States.
These are two very different interpretations of the penning of the Declaration. He's sitting in one, standing in the other.
The thing about art is that people today tend to take it far too literally. If anybody thinks Jefferson was writing the Declaration while sitting on a bench outside, using the 18th century equivalent of a laptop, those people are really dumb. Likewise, if you think he was standing up, writing the Declaration on a podium, you're almost as dumb. Instead, what is much more likely was that he was sitting at a desk throughout much of the tedious process of writing the Declaration of Independence. We see that in this painting to the right done by 1807 Portrait of Thomas Jefferson after a Painting by Gilbert Stuart. I doubt that this revelation of Jefferson writing at a desk will come as a shock to many of you.
But what's common in each of these portrayals of Thomas Jefferson? Let me give you a hint: read the title. He's wearing pants!
You're probably wondering, "People wear pants all the time, why is this strange?" (I can say that because everybody who was offended by this title either left or went straight to the comments without reading what I have written.)
I'd like to challenge that, however. Particularly if it's summer, you're single and live alone, how often do you REALLY wear pants? Or perhaps I should ask, how much time do you spend not wearing pants? And when do you not wear pants? When you're alone. I think behavioral psychologists would probably say when you're depressed. When you're not going anywhere, perhaps? When you've got nothing to do? When it's hotter than heck and the A/C isn't working (or not invented)?
Now consider this. While in Philadelphia, Jefferson rented a place for himself and didn't have a roommate. When he began work on the Declaration, he was alone since Benjamin Franklin and John Adams didn't want a hand in writing the document for a variety of (very good) reasons. The majority of his contact with the outside world came in the form of a servant, who would bring him meals and tea. In his personal life, his second daughter and mother died just a few short months earlier and Jefferson wrote extensively about the extreme grief this caused him. To make matters worse, his wife, Martha, had become deathly ill and incredibly frail after the loss of their daughter. She was bed ridden and Jefferson wasn't able to just hop on a plane and return home to see her. She was so frail that she couldn't even write to her husband, which caused Jefferson to fear that the British had found his home at Monticello and taken her and his surviving daughter. To top it all off, Jefferson was suffering from horrendous migraine headaches that left him crippled in pain. Take all of this and make it happen in the middle of the summer, and I believe there is a strong case to be made that Thomas Jefferson likely completed a significant portion of work on the Declaration of Independence whilst not wearing trousers.
Don't get me wrong, this isn't to ridicule the man whatsoever. In fact, it's to honor him in a way. Not wearing pants should be considered representative of all the heartbreaking solitude and misery Jefferson was dealing with in Philadelphia, yet despite all of this, he put service before self and drafted not just the most important document in our nation's history, but the declaration of what it means to be an American in the inspirational and optimistic words that he penned.
Today, as we celebrate our independence, let those of us who are of age remember to have a drink in honor of this Jack of All Trades, Thomas Jefferson.
