Dominion of Memories: Jefferson, Madison, and the Decline of Virginia , and: Mr. Jefferson’s Women (review)

Abstract

Dominion of Memories: Jefferson, Madison, and Decline of Virginia. By Susan Dunn. (New York: Basic Books, 2007. Pp. 310. Cloth, $27.50.)Mr. Jefferson's Women. By Jon Kukla. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007. Pp. 304. Cloth, $26.95.)Reviewed by Leonard J. SadoskyDuring summer of 1816, Frederick County innkeeper and writer Samuel Kercheval solicited assistance of his fellow Virginian, former president Thomas Jefferson, in on-again, off-again project of attempting to revise Virginia's now forty-year-old state constitution. Among other things, Kercheval and his neighbors in Shenandoah Valley hoped to alter rules by which Virginia allotted seats in state legislature. Apportionment had not kept up with population growth, and Valley counties as well as counties to west found themselves severely underrepresented. Virginia's most dynamic localities thus found their voices muffled in all manner of discussions about future of their Commonwealth.Jefferson was sympathetic to western Virginians' plight, as unequal representation in any legislature was deeply antithetical to republican principles that he had held dear since eve of American Revolution. But errors in Virginia's constitution went deeper. Jefferson took opportunity of his correspondence with Kercheval to opine on several problems he saw in Commonwealth's constitutional system. In forty years since Americans had declared their independence and Virginians drafted their revolutionary constitution, understandings of republicanism had grown more sophisticated. In 1776, Jefferson noted, the abuses of monarchy had so much filled space of political contemplation, that we imagined everything republican which was not monarchical. In intervening decades, Jefferson and others had come to understand that unequal representation in legislature, as well as an executive and judiciary that were not responsible to people, would render a polity republican in name, but something less than republican in practice. Where then is our republicanism to be found? he asked Kercheval rhetorically. Not in our Constitution certainly, but merely in spirit of our people. Through their powers of election, petition, and protest, Virginia's citizens alone had kept Commonwealth relatively free from corruption.1Virginians had thus been lucky, in that they had a populace innately committed to principles of republicanism. But luck could run out. Thus Jefferson could support, albeit privately and passively, attempts to reform Virginia's constitution. In minds of western Virginians like Kercheval, luck had run out; they were not on equal footing with Commonwealth's eastern counties. As Susan Dunn recounts in Dominion of Memories, Kercheval's lobbying and Jefferson's commentary in 1816 were two of many mileposts on path between Virginia's revolutionary constitution of 1776 and constitutional convention of 18291830. Jefferson and his friend and ally James Madison spent their political careers attempting to reform political structure of Virginia both called for a new state constitutional convention at various times from late 1770s onward, and both put forward or supported legislation (such as those laws granting religious freedom or proposing publicly funded education) that sought to soften revolutionary order's rough edges and make promise of republicanism open to all. But all these reforms had been piecemeal at best, and call for constitutional reform went unheeded until three years after Jefferson's death, with calling of a constitutional convention in 1829. Although Jefferson had passed, Dunn tells her readers, ideas he had put forward drove program of reformers such as Philip Doddridge and William Campbell as they argued passionately and vociferously for a new apportionment of legislature and an expansion of franchise. …