“Robert Penn Warren’s Encounter with Thomas Jefferson”
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Hawthorne and haw
Valleys extended, prairies idle, and the land’s
Long westward languor lifting
Toward the flaming escarpment of the end of day—(BD II, p. 10)
Thus Jefferson’s vision of the West as a land flowing with milk and honey
and human possibility blinded him to the human realities that the Louisiana
Purchase and his policies set in motion. These realities included not only the
displacement or destruction of the native peoples already inhabiting but not
working the land the land (a key point always made by the spiritual heirs of John
Locke!
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), but also the self-destruction of his nephew Meriwether Lewis,
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commander of the Lewis and Clarke expedition, the Corps of Discovery.
This double vision of man and land blinded not only Jefferson himself but
also some of those who came under his influence. Late in the poem Meriwether
Lewis tells Jefferson, “I was that fool fish to which/Your lie was the perfect lure.
Oh, sure, I gulped/It down—your nobleness.” (BD II, p. 109) Meriwether tells
Jefferson that it is Jefferson’s “lie”—his vision of brotherhood—that killed him
(BD II, pp. 116-17).
Thus the Jefferson of Brother to Dragons is twice blinded—blinded by his
vision of man and by his vision of “his West.” And perhaps also blinded by his
vision of himself as Moses, “the Israelite,” destined to bring his people to the
Promised Land but not to enter it himself. But perhaps he deceived himself most
of all with this image of himself as Moses, in that he never claimed to speak with
God and never seemed to acknowledge that his own guilt kept him from crossing
the River Jordan and entering Canaan.
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Near the beginning of the poem Jefferson refuses to acknowledge Lilburne
Lewis as anything but “the bloody brother,” (BD II, p.18) and later claims “the
fact that shakes my heart/With intrinsic shock” is that Lilburne is “blood-kin to
old Tom Jefferson.” (BD II, p. 42) He regrets not having killed the infant Lilburne
and attempts to “reject, repudiate,/And squeeze from my blood the blood of
Lilburne …” (BD II, p. 43) The trajectory of this theme of the poem—a theme we
will here leave unexplored—involves the possibility of reconciliation between
Jefferson and Lilburne Lewis. For our purposes it is enough to note that
Lilburne’s crime shakes Jefferson’s “sense of the human possibility.” (BD II, p.
42)
In Warren’s telling of this tale, Jefferson’s response to Lilburne’s crime is
to move from his understanding of man as the “bright apparition” of the
Declaration to the position that “There’s no forgiveness for our being human./It
is the inexpugnable error.” (BD II, p. 19) Jefferson is at pains to tell us that even
during his most optimistic and rational phase he knew what the score was, that
he was not a fool (BD II, pp. 7, 26 [twice], 29). Even during the period of his
greatest optimism, Jefferson tells R. P. W. and Meriwether Lewis, “if I held man
Convention