"This inspired collaboration takes us as close as we’re likely to get to the way Thomas Jefferson understood himself and his times. Not content with clichés about a man who made his world anew, Gordon-Reed and Onuf show us the world that made the man…. Here is Jefferson as he might have painted his own image, a self-portrait comprised of equal parts sun and shadow."
"A peerless team, Annette Gordon-Reed and Peter Onuf pierce the mysteries of Jefferson’s character and at last offer a compelling explanation of how the republican statesman and plantation patriarch could coexist in a single soul. Jefferson’s flaw was not hypocrisy but conviction, his unswerving belief in paternalism as empowering and beneficent."
"With characteristic insight and intellectual rigor, Annette Gordon-Reed and Peter Onuf have produced a powerful and lasting portrait of the mind of Thomas Jefferson. This is an essential and brilliant book by two of the nation’s foremost scholars—a book that will, like its protagonist, endure."
"With characteristic insight and intellectual rigor, Annette Gordon-Reed and Peter Onuf have produced a powerful and lasting portrait of the mind of Thomas Jefferson. This is an essential and brilliant book by two of the nation’s foremost scholars—a book that will, like its protagonist, endure."
★ 02/15/2016
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Gordon-Reed (law, Harvard Law Sch.; The Hemingses of Monticello) and Onuf (history, Univ. of Virginia; The Mind of Thomas Jefferson) bring their qualified expertise to present an intimate portrait of Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826), the third U.S. president. This work begins with an interesting discussion drawn from a letter composed by Jefferson's granddaughter regarding the early yet glaring differences between North and South. The authors set the issue of slavery, and Jefferson's direct connection to it, as a central theme, allowing readers to follow Jefferson through the stages of his life, all the while observing the changes in his thinking and the complicated relationships on his estate. Jefferson the paradox shines through on these pages: the plantation master who knew slavery was wrong, the revolutionary who avoided conflict, and the patriarch who advanced republicanism. Jefferson's relationship with Sally Hemings and their children are thoroughly examined. This work emphasizes ideas and connections, as opposed to dates, policy details, and data. Primary source citations include many letters and Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia. VERDICT Readers of American history and politics will enjoy this enlightening look at a fascinating man. [See Prepub Alert, 10/19/15.]—Jeffrey Meyer, Mt. Pleasant P.L., IA
2016-01-10
A portrait of Thomas Jefferson's passionate belief in Enlightenment values and how it determined his personal character and that of the young nation. Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner Gordon-Reed (American Legal History/Harvard Law School; The Hemingses of Monticello, 2009, etc.) and Onuf (Emeritus, History/Univ. of Virginia; The Mind of Thomas Jefferson, 2007, etc.) are fascinated by the many shifting "selves" of Jefferson: father, husband, slave owner, diplomat, politician, and cosmopolitan. His broad sense of himself as "the most blessed of patriarchs" is both a beautiful notion and mostly correct as well as a patronizing illusion considering that he was the master of numerous slaves at his Monticello plantation and, literally, their father. In this meticulously documented work exploring Jefferson's many roles in life, the authors take the great man at his word rather than how they think he ought to be: "We instead seek to understand what Thomas Jefferson thought he was doing in the world." Subsequently, the work proves to be a subtle, intriguing study of his Enlightenment ideals, beginning with his great hope in his fellow white Virginians as the ideal republicans who (with his help) abolished primogeniture, possessed a "fruitful attachment to land," and "knitted together…tender attachments," such as strategic arranged marriages among the upper class. However, his vision was problematic since he and his observant granddaughter Ellen, who lived for a spell in the North, documented well the differences between the slothful Southern temperament and the Northern industrious one, while the ills of slavery, which Jefferson himself wrote about in Notes on the State of Virginia, would not go away—and indeed, his own ties to the Hemingses could not be hidden. The authors make some trenchant observations regarding the effects of living in France on Jefferson's tempering of the republican ideals, in showing him both the dangers of extremism and the hope of "ameliorating" his slaves' conditions by incorporating them into his patriarchal family. An elegant, astute study that is both readable and thematically rich.
