Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)

Thomas Jefferson by Mather Brown, 1786.

Thomas Jefferson, the third president of the United States and author of the Declaration of Independence, was a prominent revolutionary leader and political philosopher. The purpose of this chapter is to summarize the evidence that Jefferson had Asperger Syndrome — a possibility that has already provided the subject matter of an entire book (see Ledgin, 2000).

Life History

Jefferson was born in Shadwell, Albemarle County, Virginia, on April 13, 1743. His father owned a plantation; his mother belonged to a prominent colonial family. He had read all his father’s books by the age of 5 (McLaughlin, 1988). The young Jefferson was interested in various aspects of science and philosophy. He studied law, was admitted to the American Bar Association in 1767, and became a successful lawyer. He married Martha Wayles Skelton, a young and wealthy widow, in 1772. She died in 1782.

Jefferson was governor of Virginia from 1779 to 1781, and later in the 1780s was a minister of the U.S. government in France, where he witnessed the early stages of the French Revolution. As a representative of the Republican Party, he became U.S. vice president in 1797 and president in 1801. Jefferson officially retired from public life in 1809, but he continued to take a keen interest in the great issues of the day, such as slavery. He died on July 4, 1826 — 50 years to the day after the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

Social Behavior

Jefferson was extremely shy, socially awkward, and lacked empathy. Ledgin (2000) notes, “If anyone became emotional in his presence, he was likely to have been discomforted noticeably. If anyone raised his or her voice, almost certainly Jefferson would have found a polite way to remove himself” (p. 1). He failed to recognize social cues and was not very interested in other people. He also failed to recognize or understand irony and tended to be a concrete thinker and to lack common sense.

Ledgin (2000) speculated that Jefferson’s relationship with Sally Hemmings (his wife’s half-sister) was partly due to the fact that she was also an outsider, being a slave. Ledgin also pointed out that many people with autism spectrum disorders seek the company of others with similar problems, as in the case of Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Jefferson’s magnetic intellect made him interesting to others, and partly for that reason the one-sidedness of his conversations was tolerated, similarly to Wittgenstein’s situation. Ledgin (2000) noted that Jefferson was apart from the mainstream in many respects and that he was eccentric and quirky.

Narrow Interests/Obsessiveness

Jefferson was described by James Parton, a nineteenth-century biographer, as a man who could “calculate an eclipse, survey an estate, tie an artery, plan an edifice, try a cause, break a horse, dance a minuet, and play a violin’ (Ledgin, 2000, p. 195). His interests clearly were not narrow in the usual sense (they included architecture, birds, coinage, weights and measures, distance measurements, English prosody, grammar and etymology, Indian vocabularies, natural history, piano tuning, Philadelphia temperatures, and scientific phenomena), but he focused on each interest in a narrow and obsessive way. He spent extremely long periods of time writing and studying alone, and noted at the age of 75 that he was still a “hard student.”

As US. president Jefferson established an economic embargo against England, which had devastating consequences similar to those of the Irish politician Eamon de Valera’s economic war with Britain in the 20th century. He wrote an enormous number of letters, like Lewis Carroll (Fitzgerald, 2005) and many others with Asperger Syndrome. He spent 54 years constructing and reconstructing his home at Monticello.

Routines/Control

Jefferson favored ritual and preservation of sameness and tended to line up or carefully arrange books, works, or toys. From about 1767 onward, he formed a habit that developed into a daily ritual of “making memorandum book entries for the rest of his life. His recording of minutiae about expenditures evolved into an everyday exercise that served little if any purpose, for he lacked meaningful accounting abilities” (Ledgin, 2000, p. 28). For 60 or more years he started each day by soaking his feet in cold, preferably icy, water.

Temple Grandin (1986), an academic and author who has autism, says that Jefferson “compulsively measured the distance his carriage traveled” (Ledgin, 2000, p. 197). This is very similar to Tesla at the dining table and to some autistic mathematical prodigies. Ellis (1997) has noted that the computer would have been the perfect Jeffersonian instrument — for example, its impersonality would have suited him well.

Jefferson was extremely controlling, particularly in looking into every aspect of the University of Virginia, which he was involved in setting up. He was hopeless at managing his own finances and had massive debts when he died. According to Ledgin (2000), Jefferson’s drawings for Monticello were carried out to precise scale and measured to several decimal places — the work of a compulsive personality.

Language/Humor

Jefferson was an extremely poor public speaker and avoided speaking in public as much as possible. Yet he had a great interest in English prosody — his kinds of linguistic interests are common in persons with Asperger Syndrome. It is noteworthy that his autobiography is unfinished. Persons with Asperger Syndrome have difficulty with autobiography.

Naivety/Childishness

Jefferson had a child-like personality and was emotionally immature. The great John Adams stated, albeit jokingly, “Jefferson was always a boy to me.” Ledgin (2000) described him as utterly naive, referred to an “Asperger’s inclination to treat fiction as fact” (p. 70) and stated “his relative immaturity ... was what made him an either-or person, one who judged on the basis of perceived right or wrong without contingencies” (p. 72).

Nonverbal Communication

Jefferson was described as the “ever-elusive Virginian with the glacial exterior and almost eerie serenity” and had problems in expressing himself (Ellis, 2000, p. 74). His behavior was sometimes enigmatic and unpredictable. According to Ledgin (2000), “He had no talent for public speaking ... he seemed uneasy with eye contact. To some his body language appeared odd and awkward. He sang under his breath constantly. Often he looked disheveled, and he drank too much’ (p. 1).

Ledgin (2000) listed the following features of autism in Jefferson: avoidance of eye contact in conversation, an inexpressive face or far-away look, few meaningful nonverbal gestures, failure to swing arms normally when walking, insensitivity to low pain levels, odd mannerisms, and trouble in starting conversation.

Jefferson was also described as having “limbs uncommonly long; his hands and feet very large, and his wrists of extraordinary size” (Chandler, 1994, pp. 26-27). His dress was extremely eccentric — he even wore slippers on state occasions. Further, Ledgin (2000) pointed out, “many of President Thomas Jefferson’s close contemporaries would have believed his greeting guests accompanied by an uncaged mocking bird or with his hair in disarray were items not worth belaboring,” as “polite people tend to look for and deal with the substance and character of those they admire” (p. 10).

Visual Thinking

According to Temple Grandin (1986), “There are two kinds of autistic-Asperger’s thought. Some who are affected are visual thinkers like me, and others are numbers and word thinkers. Both types concentrate on the details instead of the overall concept. Visual thinkers like me and visual thinkers like Jefferson are good at building things and good at mechanical design. The nonvisual detail thinkers are good at accounting and mathematics. Both types have enormous memory” (cited in Ledgin, 2000, p. 204).

Jefferson was particularly interested in architecture. In 1786, he referred to his ability to think pictorially. He wrote of visualizing “architectural ‘diagrams and crotchets’ (jointed wood used as building supports)” as a means to relax in order to fall asleep (Ledgin, 2000, p. 43). Indeed, Monticello has been described as “the quintessential example of the autobiographical house” (Adams, 1983, p. 2). “Signs of that are everywhere, especially in the built-in gadgetry” (Ledgin, 2000, p. 88). This is reminiscent of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s house in Vienna. Ledgin (2000) also stated that “architecture critic Paul Goldberger wrote that ‘both conceptually and physically’ the Jefferson intellect was central to the project. Jefferson’s psyche’ gave meaning to an exceptional architecture (Goldberger found in it ‘nothing universal’), and the more deeply one might ‘penetrate that psyche’ the more pleasure one should draw from the place” (p. 88). According to Ledgin (2000), Jefferson “must be given credit for advancing America’s household functionalism” (p. 91). Wittgenstein was also interested in functionalism.

It has been pointed out that for Jefferson, “beauty and function were inseparable” (Burstein, 1995, p. 21). This is exactly similar to Wittgenstein’s ideas on architecture. Further, like Wittgenstein, Jefferson was an inventor.

Morality

Jefferson had, according to Ledgin (2000), an unyielding perception of right and wrong. He thought of the world in black and white. This is very characteristic of people with Asperger Syndrome. Ledgin (2000) also noted that “Jefferson ... made differing judgments about the worth of individuals on grounds of their ethical conduct, sometimes relying on only a few observations or experiences with them in order to do so” (p. 91). Wittgenstein may have made equally quick judgments based on insufficient information about people. We believe that this is because of the autistic condition.

Autistic Mental Mechanisms

Jefferson has been described as an “impenetrable man” (Peterson, 1970, p. viii). Ledgin (2000) notes, “Jefferson’s knack for shielding himself against reality when fiction suited his romantic notions better,” and that “Jefferson’s taking of such poetic license influenced the drafting of the Declaration of Independence” (p. 20). This is similar to de Valera and the Irish constitution.

Ledgin (2000) also noted, “The biographer Ellis is probably the first among interpretative historians to discover that two levels of reality served Jefferson. Ellis wrote that Jefferson was capable of creating inside himself ‘separate lines of communication that would sort out conflicting signals. My Asperger’s interpretation simply adds this: On the one hand there was reality as you and I know it, and on the other hand there was a Jefferson reality which the rest of us tend to see as idealism ... The two levels are common to persons with high-functioning autism, and they deal with those separate realities daily in ways not yet clear to nonautistics” (p. 60). This is similar to de Valera’s mode of operation (i.e., there was a “de Valera fact” and then there were facts recognized by persons without autism, or de Valera’s autism — see Fitzgerald, 2004).

According to Ledgin (2000), Ellis noted that “denial mechanisms” gave Jefferson some guidance and that “interior defenses” protected him from becoming unduly pressed (p. 84). Ellis maintained that “capsules or compartments” had been “constructed” in Jefferson’s “mind or soul” to stop conflicting thoughts from colliding (Ellis, 1997, pp. 88, 149, 174). Such compartmentalization is common in persons with autism, such as the artist L. S. Lowry; we also see it in Einstein (Fitzgerald, 2005).

In discussing high-functioning persons with autism, Ledgin (2000) stated, “To put it simply, they live mentally and perhaps emotionally on two planes. They live in our world of nonautistics, but they carry with them a separate and otherworldly ‘reality’ — their reality. The rest of us see it as idealism, but autistics seem to convert it into something palpable” (p. 58).

Conclusion

The evidence that Thomas Jefferson had Asperger Syndrome is very convincing indeed.

- Michael Fitzgerald, Former Professor of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry