He invented a pasta maker, played the violin, spoke five languages, rewrote the Bible, and radically changed governments forever—but was Thomas Jefferson 2e?
As we learn more about neurodiversity, we’re gaining new perspectives on people who made a profound difference in our world. On this Independence Day, let’s consider if Thomas Jefferson was “on the spectrum.”
The creation of the United States of America is (arguably) the most radical innovation in human society. In 1776, the Founders risked their lives against the British Empire, the most powerful force the world had ever seen, to put the never truly realized idea of representative democracy into action. For the first time, people—not kings, warlords, priests, the rich and powerful—would have control over their lives. (The legal term, “people,” in the U.S. and elsewhere, would gradually evolve to include
all people). This had never happened in a sustained way before 1776, and since then, we are astounded when it doesn’t happen everywhere in the world.
Though George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, and James Madison, among many others, made integral contributions to what became the United States, the mind of the nation, its cognitive operating instructions, came primarily from Jefferson.
The author of the
Declaration of Independence, Jefferson became the third president. He purchased the Louisiana Territory, defeated Barbary pirates, and worked on ending the international slave trade. In addition, he had fame as an inventor, scientist, philosopher, farmer, architect, scholar, musician, and he inspired the French Revolution.
Jefferson is also one of the most complicated people in our lives. From a normative point of view, it’s hard to reconcile his many contradictions; a slave holder who hated slavery, an elitist who loved the common people, a loner who was extremely popular, a defender of a free press who tried to manipulate it, an agnostic who was fascinated by Jesus. In a word, complicated.
The other word for him might be “autistic”—although “neurodiverse” captures it better. In
Diagnosing Jefferson: Evidence of a Condition That Guided His Beliefs, Behavior, and Personal Associations, journalist Norm Ledgin put Jefferson into a twice exceptional context.
“Up close he seemed uneasy with eye contact,” writes Ledgin. “His body language appeared odd and awkward. He sang under his breath constantly. Often, he looked disheveled.” He had a “stony-faced demeanor,” a tendency to make “awkward gestures in conversation,” an “inability to show affection,” a “compulsion to jot down every financial transaction and weather report, and to calculate the distance he traveled by carriage by counting the number of times the wheels rotated.” He was absolutely “obsessive” when it came to his areas of interest—whether collecting wine or books or his lifelong renovations on his Monticello mansion.
Monticello itself is sometimes considered an “architectural autobiography,” a visual and physical representation of the complications and variability of Jefferson’s “psyche,” according to the art critic Paul Goldberger. In her afterwards to Ledgin’s book, Temple Grandin, the author of
Thinking in Pictures: Other Reports from My Life with Autism, adds that Jefferson’s “autism” gave him the power to think in comprehensive visual dimensions and that was “fundamental to our democracy.”
However, diagnosing from a distance of two hundred and fifty years is not without problems. Autism wasn’t recognized as a separate condition in the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual until 1994, with Autism Spectrum Disorder officially recognized only in 2013 in the
DSM-V. As a “spectrum” it is difficult to identify and describe because it differs with each individual and intersects with many variable factors.
J.D. Smith of the University of North Carolina found Ledgin’s diagnosis fraught with unsubstantiated claims. He relates Jefferson’s behavior to mental impairments observed in his brother and sister, but, of course, those are hard to verify as well. An autism blogger, Jonathan Mitchell, writes that today we diagnose ASD beginning at age 4, and since we don’t have records of Jefferson’s early years, there is no way to confirm or deny that he had autism.
Whatever we label it, Jefferson’s “different” way of being and thinking led to an historic shift in the way we all live, not only here, but all over the world. He didn’t act alone, and many other factors contributed to the launch of the American experiment, but he had the vision and the drive to insist that all of us have a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
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