America's Obsessives: The Compulsive Energy That Built a Nation Read Free Page B

core obsessions and compulsions could rarely be held in check for very long.

(Photo source: “A philosopher, a patriote and a friend. Dessiné par son ami Tadée Kociuszko et gravé par Michal Sokolnicki.” Ca. 1800–1816. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division [LC-USZC4-7084].)

1.
Politics: Thomas Jefferson
    Omniscient Organizer
    A mind always employed is always happy. This is the true secret, the grand recipe for felicity.
    —Thomas Jefferson, letter to his daughter Martha, May 21, 1787
    O n the morning of Monday, July 1, 1776, Thomas Jefferson had, it can safely be said, a lot on his mind.
    On that fateful day, the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia was to consider the resolution, first introduced on June 7 by his fellow Virginian Richard H. Lee, to dissolve “all political connection between [the Colonies] and the state of Great Britain.” And as soon as that resolution passed, as Jefferson expected it would, his draft of the Declaration of Independence, which he had completed the previous Friday, was due to come to the floor for a vote. Hypersensitive to criticism, the assiduous thirty-three-year-old wordsmith dreaded the thought of any tinkering with his text. (In fact, for the rest of his life, Jefferson would be bitter about the “mutilations” that his congressional colleagues were about to make, which reduced its length by about 25 percent.) He was also unnerved because the war effort of the new nation-to-be was not going well; the American troops in Canada, who lacked essential provisions due to a shortage of money, had just been hit by a smallpox epidemic. “Our affairs in Canada,” Jefferson wrote later that day to William Fleming, a delegate to Virginia’s new independent state legislature, “go still retrograde.”
    The six-foot-two-and-a-half-inch delegate with the angular face, sandy complexion, and reddish hair was also dogged by a host of domestic concerns. He was still recovering from the sudden death—her illness lasted less than an hour—of his fifty-six-year-old mother, Jane Randolph Jefferson, three months earlier. For most of April and the first part of May, Jefferson was detained by incapacitating migraines at Monticello, his five-thousand-acre estate, then a two-week journey by horseback from Philadelphia. And with his frail wife, Martha, pregnant for the third time in six years, he felt, as he informed Virginia’s de facto governor, Edmund Pendleton, on June 30, that it was “indispensably necessary … [to] solicit the substitution of some other person” to take his seat in the Continental Congress by the end of the year. As it turned out, an anxious Jefferson couldn’t even wait that long; on September 2, he would submit his resignation and return to his “country,” as he still called his native Virginia.
    Amid all the uncertainty and anxiety that he faced early on that sweltering July morning, Jefferson did a surprising thing. He started what turned out to be a massive list. For Jefferson, as for other obsessives, list making was a passionate pursuit that could help him get his bearings. Flipping his copy of The Philadelphia Newest Almanack, for the Year of Our Lord 1776 upside down, he wrote on the first interleaved blank page at the back, “Observations on the weather.” Below this heading, he set up three columns, “July, hour, thermom.” At 9 a.m., he recorded 81½. With the debate on Lee’s resolution taking up most of the day, Jefferson did not do another temperature reading until 7 p.m., when he recorded 82. But for the rest of that momentous week and for years on end, he would record the temperature at least three times a day. On the fourth, when the mercury hit 68 at 6 a.m. before reaching a fitting high of 76 at 1 p.m., he even managed to squeeze in a total of four readings. On the day that the Declaration was signed, Jefferson also made the fifteen-minute trek from his room at Seventh and Market to John Sparhawk’s book and gadget