A Gasconade

ere is the context in which President Jefferson made the extravagant prediction quoted by Dr. Fritz in the last section, "Discovering Lewis and Clark," of his essay "A Synopsis": "Let us, then, with courage and confidence pursue our own Federal and Republican principles, our attachment to union and representative government. Kindly separated by nature and a wide ocean from the exterminating havoc of one quarter of the globe [the then-warring powers of Europe]; too high-minded to endure the degradations of the others; possessing a chosen country, with room enough for our descendants, to the thousandth and thousandth generation."¹

Today, the term "generation," which denotes the interval of time between the birth of parents and the birth of their children, is considered to be thirty years, but Jefferson himself defined a generation as nineteen years. If we interpret Jefferson's phrase, "thousandth and thousandth" to mean two thousand years, then he was saying that "our chosen country" would not be filled for 38,000 years! We cannot be sure whether he was referring to the land encompassed by the United States at that moment, or anticipating his country's eventual occupancy of the continent all the way to the Pacific. In either case, this rhetorical flourish must have sounded, even then, like a boastful exaggeration — a gasconade.² We are now, in 2003, about halfway through Jefferson's tenth generation.

---Joseph Mussulman

1. First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1801, in Merrill D. Peterson, ed., Thomas Jefferson: Writings (New York: Literary Classics of theUnited States, Inc., 1984), 493–94.

2. Not to be confused with the Gasconade River in Missouri, which was named by French explorers, reportedly because it reminded some of them of the pre-Revolutionary province of Gascogne on the Atlantic coast at the boundary between France and Spain. It is now the region known as Gascony. The Corps of Discovery camped opposite the mouth of the Gasconade River on May 26, 1804. Sgt. Gass judged it "a handsome place, — a rich soil and pleasant country."