Americans think George Ticknor (1791–1871) was their nation’s first Hispanist. They’re wrong; and they overrate the intellect of the Harvard professor. Like his admirers, Ticknor had a linear and encyclopedic mind. We should be grateful—he collected and collated the major texts of the modern history of European literature. But his analysis was buggy, handicapped by his limited appreciation of Miguel de Cervantes—inventor of the modern novel and hence the greatest author of the tradition Ticknor presumed to present to us. At best, his view of Cervantes drifted a tad bit upstream from that of most eighteenth-century readers. He intuited that Don Quijote de la Mancha (1605/15) is more than light-hearted entertainment. Nor is it a mere collection of jokes and comedic incidents. But Ticknor went no further than positing a pole reversal between the hidalgo and Sancho Panza in the novel’s second part. He neither unraveled nor ignited what that textual metamorphosis signaled for the advent of modern democracy (i.e., for us).
Like Ticknor, most readers in the United States ignore Jefferson’s Hispanism, its relevance, and its meaning, because it lies hidden before them in plain sight—like a letter on a desk. Moreover, the simplistic minds of politicians, historians, biographers, and law professors lack access to the artistic complexity of Jefferson’s thought. In five brief installments, I’ll review the epistolary, literary, and architectural evidence for Jefferson’s Hispanism, placing emphasis on his sociopolitical understanding of Cervantes’s opus magnum. I’ll also allege three comparative proofs of this to be found in important texts by Edgar Allan Poe, Alexis de Tocqueville, and Jorge Luis Borges.
Let’s begin with Jefferson’s correspondence, which offers the most overt signals of his appreciation of Cervantes. Along the lines of what Stephen Greenblatt has called “self-fashioning,” Jefferson saw his letters as an integral part of his intellectual and aesthetic legacy. Conscious of their eventual publication after his death, he devised a mechanism for making copies. Jefferson points to Don Quijote in eleven letters. Eight others written by family, acquaintances, and colleagues do likewise. At first glance, there’s no complexity here, but they lay the grounds for Jefferson’s vision of Cervantes’s novel as vital to the future of the nation he founded. He considered Don Quijote an essential book for any serious library and was particularly concerned that his daughters read it. (See Jefferson’s letters to Marbois, dated 5 Dec. 1783, Cabot, 24 Jul. 1784, Elizabeth Wayles Eppes, 7 Mar. 1785, and Mary Jefferson, 11 Apr. 1790 and 23 May 1790; see Mary’s letters to her father, 25 Apr. 1790, 23 May 1790, 22 Jan. 1791, and 18 Apr. 1791; and see Thomas Mann Randolph’s letter to Jefferson, 2 Feb. 1791.)
These epistolary facts help us to frame Jefferson’s sense of the novel. This sense is twofold.
On the one hand, Jefferson knew that the future of the United States of America involved its convergence with the Spanish empire. The same idea is visible in his linguistic and pedagogical priorities. English is natural (Bacon, Locke, and Newton); Greek (Aristotle, Homer, and Aesop), Latin (Virgil and Cicero), and French (Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Rousseau) are important; but Spanish holds the keys to the future (especially Cortés, Ulloa, Solís, Palafox, Mariana, and Cervantes). This intellectual and diplomatic pivot also appears in Jefferson’s gestures as the new nation’s third president. Three of these are particularly illustrative: (1) his aggressive pursuit of the First Barbary War (1801–05), by which he conducted America’s first military action; (2) his enthusiasm for the Louisiana Purchase (1803), by which he unleashed America’s first constitutional crisis; (3) and his formal reception of the esteemed Latin Americanist Alexander von Humboldt at the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia (1804). In sum, Jefferson’s imperial orchestration of American democracy echoed Cervantes’s liberation from slavery at Algiers (see especially “The Captive’s Tale,” DQ 1.39–41), supplemented by a driving interest in the geopolitical and socioeconomic vicissitudes of the Spanish-speaking populations to the south and west of his new nation (cf. especially Palafox’s The Conquest of China). Moreover, we must wager that in Jefferson’s mind liberty is in important ways a Spanish construct and its future cannot possibly avoid involvement with the Hispanic half of the New World.
On the other hand, Jefferson’s more intimate concern that his daughters should read Don Quijote boils down to the same compounded issues of governance, education, and freedom. Foremost, we know that his daughters abhorred slavery and wanted African Americans to be free. In a spectacular passage in a letter to her father written from Paris and dated 3 May 1787, Jefferson’s eldest daughter Martha, at the tender age of fourteen, describes a recent encounter between a ship from Virginia and a corsair from Algiers. This letter has profound implications for Jefferson’s foreign policy, his opinion that slavery should be abolished in the United States, as well as his insistence, beginning around 1783, that his daughters Martha (“Patsy”) and Mary (“Polly”) should read Don Quijote. Indeed, Martha’s letter, which quite clearly glosses “The Captive’s Tale,” shows that she has understood the lesson of Cervantes’s novel and its relevance for America. Here too is a masterful case of “self-fashioning,” as Mary announces to the world that she is the rational and moral abolitionist that her father hopes her to be.
A virginia ship comming to spain met with a corser of the same strength. They fought And the battle lasted an hour and a quarter. The Americans gained and boarded the corser where they found chains that had been prepared for them. They took them and made use of them for the algerians them selves. They returned to virginia from whence they are to go back to algers to change the prisoners to which if the algerians will not consent the poor creatures will be sold as slaves. Good god have we not enough? I wish with all my soul that the poor negroes were all freed. It greives my heart when I think that these our fellow creatures should be treated so teribly as they are by many of our country men.
We know from Jefferson’s version of the Declaration of Independence, his ordinances for the Northwest Territories, and his Notes on the State of Virginia (see especially “Query XVIII”), that Martha and Mary’s father thought the abolition of slavery both morally advisable and cosmically inevitable: “Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people are to be free” (Notes for an Autobiography, 6 Jan. 1821). But it’s now appropriate to go a step further. Fourteen-year-old Martha Jefferson—who would go on to be the Acting First Lady of the United States (1801–09) and then the First Lady of Virginia (1819–22)—penned a letter that remains to this day the most efficient way to frame the “self-fashioned” and deeply Hispanic sense of Jefferson’s presidency as well as his artistic and juridical legacy for America. All men are created equal in an undeniable and inalienable sense. And thus, slavery, one man’s domination of the will of another, is abhorrent and must be eliminated from the face of the earth.
As the hidalgo says to his squire in DQ 2.58: “Liberty, Sancho, is one of the most precious gifts that the heavens have given to men; no treasures that the earth holds buried or the sea conceals can compare with her; for liberty, as for honor, life may and ought to be ventured; and on the other hand, captivity is the greatest evil that happen to men.”
Image of Thomas Jefferson by Mather Brown by Daderot — Wikimedia Commons
