Sentimental Journey: Garry Wills and theAmerican Founding

Inventing America. By Garry Wills. (Garden City, NY: Doubleday,1978). Pp. 398.

Explaining America. By Garry Wills. (Garden City, NY: Double-day, 1981). Pp. 286*

All roads used to lead to Rome. According to Garry Wills, authorof Inventing America and Explaining America, all roads lead toEdinburgh. Wills, trained classicist, former journalist of the rightand now of the left, argues that the American founding is bestunderstood as a product of the Scottish Enlightenment. Both theDeclaration of Independence and The Federalist are works com-prehended most accurately through the refined vision of such Scotsas Francis Hutcheson and David Hume. Their writings constitutethe intellectual foundation upon which the American nation wasbuilt.

What perhaps is most worth praising about Inventing Americaand Explaining America is that both books attempt to understandthe founding period by taking seriously the Declaration of In-dependence and the papers of The Federalist. Unlike Charles Beard,who reduced such documents to the pre-political, or Gordon Wood,who reduced them by ignoring them, Wills begins by assuming thatthese seminal attempts by the founders to explain events of 1776 and1787 are indeed worth considering.' While some historians take thehigh road and most take the low, it is apparently not true that theywill all arrive in Glasgow together. The high road is better suited,although perhaps not sufficient, for viewing the principled andstatesmanlike deeds of the founding generation.

*All page references in parentheses in the body of the text are to these volumes.1. See Martin Diamond, " Democracy and The Federalist: A Reconsideration of the

Framers' Intent," APSR 53 (March, 1959), pp. 52-68 and Gary J. Schmitt and RobertH. Webking, "Revolutionaries, Anti-Federalists, and Federalists: Comments on Gor-don Wood's Understanding of the American Founding." The Political ScienceReviewer 9 (1979), pp. 195-229.

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Inventing America

Inventing America offers a variety of readings of the Declarationof Independence. There is first the political declaration, that craftedby the Congress. Wills covers this ground in Part One, "Revolu-tionary Charter." Then there is the symbolic declaration, crafted byLincoln and others. Wills covers this in Part Five, "National Sym-bol." And finally, there is Jefferson's Declaration. As Wills himselfsays, "the heart of my analysis, in the book's central parts (Two,Three and Four), is devoted to Jefferson's draft" (ix).

Much can and should be said about Wills' scholarship in PartsOne and Five. 2 To do so, however, would only obscure the more im-portant argument that is the core of Inventing America. For in thethree central sections ("A Scientific Paper," "A Moral Paper," and"A Sentimental Paper") Wills seeks nothing less than to transformour traditional understanding of the Declaration as a documentestablishing the principle of individual liberty into a manifestoestablishing our sociability.

Wills' thesis is that the Declaration of Independence, as draftedby Jefferson, is only intelligible when seen through eyes tutored inthe works of the Scottish Enlightenment. Lord Kames, Adam Smith,Adam Ferguson, David Hume, Thomas Reid and, particularly,Francis Hutcheson conceived the thoughts that Jefferson incor-porated into the Declaration. The moral philosophy of the men ofAberdeen, Edinburgh and points between informed the politicaltheory of government expressed in that most famous of foundingdocuments (167-319; especially 180, 200-1, 204-5, 233-9).

Wills' argument is quite novel. It challenges the orthodoxy con-cerning the Declaration and Jefferson's writing of it. Historicalscholarship has long agreed with Carl Becker's claim in TheDeclaration of Independence: A Study in the History of Political

2. Two reviews of particular value on Inventing America are Harry V. Jaffa's " In-venting the Past" in The St. Johns Review 33 (Autumn, 1981), pp. 3-19 and RonaldHamowy's "Jefferson and the Scottish Enlightenment: A Critique of Garry Wills ' In-venting America" in The William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 36 (October, 1979),pp. 503-23. The former is useful for the larger perspective in which it places Wills' ef-fort and the latter is a careful examination of his scholarship. Hamowy's essay waspointed out to me after completion of this review; several points made in this revieware made also by Hamowy.

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Ideas that the Declaration reflects the natural rights philosophy ofJohn Locke. 3

It is important to note that the claim of Inventing America is notsimply that the Scottish Enlightenment was an influence, oneamong many. Rather, Wills argues that it was the influence. Sogreat was its hold, he claims, that Locke's treatises on governmentmight as well not have been written. Wills boldly challenges thestanding tradition by asserting that "there is no indication Jeffersonread the Second Treatise carefully or with profit. Indeed, there is nodirect proof he ever read it at all" (174).

The proof for these assertions? Not much. Indeed, so slim is Wills'evidence that one wonders whether his claims do not escalate in pro-portion to the lack of documentation that marks the chapters of In-venting America. Where the proof is slight, the hyperbole is not.

It is, of course, not Wills' fault that the evidence for detailing theinfluences which bore on Jefferson's intellectual make-up is small.Jefferson's library was consumed by fire in 1770. Along with hisbooks, most of his papers were also lost. In attempting to reconstructthe mind of Jefferson in these crucial formative years the historianmeets a great void. It is only by inference that one can rebuild theintellectual climate in which Jefferson lived. Given the slightness ofthe evidence, grand statements such as those Wills is prone to makeseem dubious.

For example, Inventing America pins much of its claim regardingJefferson's indebtedness to the Scottish Enlightenment on the factthat Jefferson's primary tutor during his undergraduate days at theCollege of William and Mary was William Small. According toWills, it was Small-a pupil of John Gregory, a member of theAberdeen philosophic circle-who introduced the young Virginianto Hutcheson's writings and who taught them to him in Hutcheson'sown method (167; 177-80). From this, Wills, without the slightesthesitation, concludes that "Jefferson spent the four most intellec-tually exciting and influential years of his life studying that entire`system of things' under Small's guidance" (180).

Wills exaggerates Small's influence on the young Jefferson. Jeffer-son was a student at William and Mary for only two years, not four.Jefferson came to the college in 1760 and left to study law with

3. Carl Becker, The Declaration of Independence: A Study in the History ofPolitical Ideas (NY: Vintage, 1922). (Cf. pp. xxix-xxvi, 168-69, 174-75.)

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George Wythe in 1762. 4 Moreover, no record exists of what Smallactually said in his classes. Wills seems to presume that Smallpresented and Jefferson accepted the main tenets of Francis Hut-cheson's thoughts uncritically. Jefferson's mind is presented as anempty jar into which Hutcheson's ideas were poured.

This, of course, might have been the case. Yet there is no evidencethat it was; indeed, there is evidence to the contrary.

In or around the time that Jefferson was a student at William andMary, he began a journal in which he copied portions of books andessays he found to be of particular interest. His Commonplace Bookwas filled with notes on government, the law, science and religion.There is not a single entry from the corpus of Francis Hutcheson. IfJefferson found the Scot's ideas particularly illuminating or pro-found he kept that fact not only from others but also from himself.5

Yet Small's influence, Wills might reply, was not confined to thetime Jefferson had formally spent under his tutelage. For example,Wills makes much of the fact that Small returned to Aberdeen in1764, the year that Scot Thomas Reid published his Inquiry Into theHuman Mind. Wills claims that Jefferson "must have" greeted thepublication "with special interest" as it was "relayed to him by hisprincipal witness to intellectual life abroad," William Small (183).From such conjecture Wills concludes that Reid is the source of theepistemology from which Jefferson drew the Declaration 's term"self-evident. "8

Again the evidence is hardly overwhelming. We have no idea ofwhat Small actually wrote to his former student nor even what Jef-ferson thought of Reid. What we do know, however, is that Jeffer-son's Commonplace Book makes no mention of, nor has any entryfrom, Reid 's Inquiry-or, for that matter, any of his works. Except

4. See Hamowy, "Jefferson and the Scottish Enlightenment, " p. 504.5. Gilbert Chinard, ed., The Commonplace Book of Thomas Jefferson (Baltimore:

Johns Hopkins University Press, 1926).6. Pp. 181-192. " There is no reason to believe that Jefferson had recourse to Reid in

choosing the term `self-evident,' or that he meant anything more by it than didLocke.... This is supported by reference to earlier drafts of the document, where Jef-ferson had originally written `sacred and undeniable'.... There is not one whit ofevidence that this textual change was made by Jefferson because of having readThomas Reid. Indeed, there is no evidence that Jefferson was in any way influenced byReid. Reid is mentioned only once in all of Jefferson' s writings; he possessed no worksof Reid in the library he accumulated and catalogued between 1783 and 1814."Hamowy, "Jefferson and the Scottish Enlightenment, " p. 515, n. 43.

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for a booklist Jeffers