A Companion to Thomas Jefferson E-Book

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Blackwell Companions to American History
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 1664

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

A Companion to Thomas Jefferson presents a state-of-the-art assessment and overview of the life and legacy of Thomas Jefferson through a collection of essays grounded in the latest scholarship.

• Features essays by the leading scholars in the field, including Pulitzer Prize winners Annette Gordon-Reed and Jack Rakove
• Includes a section that considers Jefferson’s legacy
• Explores Jefferson’s wide range of interests and expertise, and covers his public career, private life, his views on democracy, and his writings
• Written to be accessible for the non-specialist as well as Jefferson scholars
  

Leseprobe

Contents

Figures and Tables

Figure

Tables

Notes on Contributors

Abbreviations

Introduction

PART I: Jefferson’s Life and Times

CHAPTER ONE: Jefferson and Biography

The Pitch

The Responses

CHAPTER TWO: Jefferson’s Virginia

Introduction

Virginia to 1750

Virginia in 1750

Revolution

Revolutionary Changes

Passing

CHAPTER THREE: Thomas Jefferson and A Summary View of the Rights of British North America

CHAPTER FOUR: The Declaration of Independence

The Road to Independence

Writing the Declaration

The Declaration as a Philosophical Document: The Introduction

The Declaration as a Propaganda Document: The Grievances

The Declaration as a Foreign Policy Document: Conclusion

CHAPTER FIVE: “I have known”: Thomas Jefferson, Experience, and Notes on the State of Virginia

CHAPTER SIX: The Virginia Statute for Establishing Religious Freedom

The Statute

Thomas Jefferson and Religion

The Battle for the Statute

The Statute and the First Amendment

Conclusion

A Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom5

CHAPTER SEVEN: A Republican Reformation: Thomas Jefferson’s Civil Religion and the Separation of Church from State

The Controversy

Jefferson’s Public God

Jefferson’s Religion

A Republican Reformation

Education and Capability6

Conclusion: An Ironic Wall

CHAPTER EIGHT: The Paris Years of Thomas Jefferson

A man for all seasons

Political Life

Intellectual life

The Rights of Man, the Citizen, James Hemings, and Sally Hemings

CHAPTER NINE: Jefferson as Party Leader

CHAPTER TEN: A Qualified Revolution: The Presidential Election of 1800

The Crisis Mentality of 1800

The Election of 1800

The Electoral Tie

Jefferson the President

CHAPTER ELEVEN: The (Federalist?) Presidency of Thomas Jefferson

The Substance of Style

The Purposes of Parsimony

Promises and problems in the West

The Limits of Limited Government

Emperor of Liberty?

CHAPTER TWELVE: From “Floating Ardor” to the “Union of Sentiment”: Jefferson on the Relationship between Public Opinion and the Executive

Executive Discretion

Public Judgment

Executive Discretion and Public Judgment

CHAPTER THIRTEEN: Jefferson and International Relations

Revolutionary Diplomacy

Minister to France

Secretary of State and Opposition to the Federalists

Presidential Diplomacy and Retirement

CHAPTER FOURTEEN: Jefferson in Retirement

PART II: Themes

CHAPTER FIFTEEN: Thomas Jefferson and Native Americans

Context

Culture

Conquest

CHAPTER SIXTEEN: Thomas Jefferson: Planter andFarmer

Philosophical Planter

Mathematical Manager

Honorary Farmer

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: Thomas Jefferson and Slavery

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: Sally Hemings

CHAPTER NINETEEN: Thomas Jefferson and Affairs of the Heart

Martha Wayles Skelton’s Sterne

Maria Cosway’s Heart

Patsy’s Angel

Angelica’s Little Urn

America’s Angel and Amazon

CHAPTER TWENTY: Thomas Jefferson and John Adams

Two Men of 1776

Americans in Paris

The Republic and the World

The Federal Era, the French Revolution, and the Early Republic

Retirement and Reconciliation

Last Writes

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE: The Libraries of Thomas Jefferson

The Shadwell Library

The Early Monticello Library

The Annapolis Library

The Paris Library

The Great Library

The Vacation Library at Poplar Forest

The Retirement Library

The University of Virginia Library

Conclusion

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO: Jefferson and the Law

Jefferson’s Reputation and the Law

Jefferson’s Ambivalence about the Law

Jefferson’s Legal Project

Jefferson, Slavery, and Law

Jefferson and the Law of Church and State

Jefferson and the Reform of Law

Conclusion

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE: Thomas Jefferson, Cosmopolitanism, and the Enlightenment

Enlightened Traveler

Provincial Cosmopolite

Cosmopolitan Nationalist

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR: Thomas Jefferson and the Ancient World

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE: Jefferson and American Democracy

Becoming a Democrat

Revolutionary Origins of American Democracy

Aristocracy and Democracy

Federalism and Mixed Government

Legacies

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX: Thomas Jefferson and Constitutionalism

Challenging the Imperial Constitutional Context (1743–1776)

Constitutional and Legal Reformer (1776–1784)

The Constitutional View from Abroad (1784–1789)

Within the Context of the United States Constitution (1789–1801)

President Jefferson’s Constitutional Vision (1801–1809)

The Constitutional Sage of Monticello (1809–1826)

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN: Political Economy

Time, Space, and the Expanding Republic

The War-System, Antistatism, and Liberty

The Jeffersonians in Power

Legacy

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT: Jefferson and Education

PART III: Legacy

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE: History, Politics, and the Self: Jefferson’s “Anas” and Autobiography

Introduction

The Anas

The Autobiography

CHAPTER THIRTY: “For Generations to Come”: Creating the “Definitive” Jefferson Edition

Origins

Setting to Work

Reception of the Volumes

Sustaining the Edition

Impact and Legacy

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE: Preservation and Education: Monticello and the Thomas Jefferson Foundation

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO: Jefferson’s Legacy: The Nation as Interpretative Community

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE: Thomas Jefferson in the Twenty-First Century

Bibliography

Primary Sources

Secondary Sources

Index

BLACKWELL COMPANIONS TO AMERICAN HISTORY

This series provides essential and authoritative overviews of the scholarship that has shaped our present understanding of the American past. Edited by eminent historians, each volume tackles one of the major periods or themes of American history, with individual topics authored by key scholars who have spent considerable time in research on the questions and controversies that have sparked debate in their field of interest. The volumes are accessible for the non-specialist, while also engaging scholars seeking a reference to the historiography or future concerns.

Published:

A Companion to the American RevolutionEdited by Jack P. Greene and J. R. Pole

A Companion to 19th-Century AmericaEdited by William L. Barney

A Companion to the American SouthEdited by John B. Boles

A Companion to American Indian HistoryEdited by Philip J. Deloria and Neal Salisbury

A Companion to American Women’s HistoryEdited by Nancy Hewitt

A Companion to Post-1945 AmericaEdited by Jean-Christophe Agnew and Roy Rosenzweig

A Companion to the Vietnam WarEdited by Marilyn Young and Robert Buzzanco

A Companion to Colonial AmericaEdited by Daniel Vickers

A Companion to 20th-Century AmericaEdited by Stephen J. Whitfield

A Companion to the American WestEdited by William Deverell

A Companion to American Foreign RelationsEdited by Robert Schulzinger

A Companion to the Civil War and ReconstructionEdited by Lacy K. Ford

A Companion to American TechnologyEdited by Carroll Pursell

A Companion to African-American HistoryEdited by Alton Hornsby

A Companion to American ImmigrationEdited by Reed Ueda

A Companion to American Cultural HistoryEdited by Karen Halttunen

A Companion to California HistoryEdited by William Deverell and David Igler

A Companion to American Military HistoryEdited by James Bradford

A Companion to Los AngelesEdited by William Deverell and Greg Hise

A Companion to American Environmental HistoryEdited by Douglas Cazaux Sackman

A Companion to Benjamin FranklinEdited by David Waldstreicher

In preparation:

A Companion to American Urban HistoryEdited by David Quigley

A Companion to American Legal HistoryEdited by Sally Hadden and Alfred L. Brophy

A Companion to World War Two (2 volumes)Edited by Thomas Zeiler

A Companion to the History of American ScienceEdited by Mark Largent

A Companion to Supreme Court History (2 volumes)Edited by John Vile

A Companion to American Sports HistoryEdited by Steven Riess

PRESIDENTIAL COMPANIONS

Published:

A Companion to Franklin D. RooseveltEdited by William Pederson

A Companion to Richard M. NixonEdited by Melvin Small

A Companion to Thomas JeffersonEdited by Francis D. Cogliano

In preparation:

A Companion to Abraham LincolnEdited by Michael Green

A Companion to George WashingtonEdited by Edward G. Lengel

A Companion to Harry S. TrumanEdited by Daniel S. Margolies

A Companion to Theodore RooseveltEdited by Serge Ricard

A Companion to Lyndon B. JohnsonEdited by Mitchell Lerner

A Companion to Andrew JacksonEdited by Sean Patrick Adams

A Companion to Woodrow WilsonEdited by Ross A. Kennedy

A Companion to Dwight D. EisenhowerEdited by Chester J. Pach

A Companion to Ronald ReaganEdited by Andrew L. Johns

A Companion to James Madison and James MonroeEdited by Stuart Leibiger

A Companion to John Adams and John Quincy AdamsEdited by David Waldstreicher

A Companion to the Antebellum Presidents, 1837–1861Edited by Joel Silbey

A Companion to the Reconstruction Presidents, 1865–1881Edited by Edward Frantz

A Companion to Gerald R. Ford and Jimmy CarterEdited by V. Scott Kaufman

A Companion to Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert HooverEdited by Katherine A. S. Sibley

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A companion to Thomas Jefferson / edited by Francis D. Cogliano.p. cm. – (Blackwell companions to American history)Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4443-3015-11. Jefferson, Thomas, 1743–1826. 2. Presidents–United States–Biography. 3. United States–Politics and government–1783–1809. I. Cogliano, Francis D. E332.C69 2012973.4′6092–dc22[B]

2011013464

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This book is published in the following electronic formats: ePDFs [ISBN 9781444344608]; Wiley Online Library [ISBN 9781444344639]; ePub [ISBN 9781444344615]; Mobi [ISBN 9781444344622]

For

Frank Shuffelton

Figures and Tables

Figure

28.1

Charlottesville, and Monticello.

Tables

27.1

Non-debt-related government spending (four-year total) and size of public debt (final year of administration) ($ millions).

27.2

Imports and government revenue ($ millions).

Notes on Contributors

Cameron Addis is Professor of History at Austin Community College and Instructor at American Military University. He is the author of Jefferson’s Vision for Education (2003), studied as fellow at the International Center for Jefferson Studies in 1997–1998, and spoke at the opening of the USMA Jefferson Library at West Point in 2008.

Jeremy D. Bailey is Associate Professor at the University of Houston, where he holds a dual appointment in the department of political science and the Honors College. He is now at work on a book on James Madison’s treatment of constitutional imperfection. Bailey is the author of Thomas Jefferson and Executive Power (2007). He has also published articles in American Political Science Review, Review of Politics, Presidential Studies Quarterly, Publius: The Journal of Federalism, and Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy.

R.B. Bernstein is distinguished adjunct professor of law at New York Law School, where he has taught since 1991. His books include The Founding Fathers Reconsidered (2009), Thomas Jefferson (2003), and the forthcoming The Education of John Adams.

Andrew Burstein is Charles P. Manship Professor of History at Louisiana State University. He is the author of seven books on early American political culture, including Jefferson’s Secrets (2005), The Inner Jefferson (1995), and most recently Madison and Jefferson (2010), which he coauthored with Nancy Isenberg.

Andrew Cayton, Distinguished Professor of History at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, is the author of Frontier Indiana (1996); co-author with Fred Anderson of The Dominion of War: Empire and Liberty in North America, 1500–2000 (2005); and co-editor with Fredrika J. Teute of Contact Points: American Frontiers from the Mohawk Valley to the Mississippi, 1750–1830 (1998).

Francis D. Cogliano is Professor of American History at the University of Edinburgh. He is the author of Thomas Jefferson: Reputation and Legacy (2006) and Revolutionary America, 1763–1815: A Political History (2000, 2009, 2nd ed.) among other publications.

Matthew E. Crow is a PhD candidate in History at UCLA. He has been a research fellow at the Library of the American Philosophical Society as well as the Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies. His dissertation is entitled In the Course of Human Events: Jefferson, Text, and the Potentialities of Law.

Max M. Edling is a lecturer and research fellow in the History Department at Uppsala University. He is an expert on the American founding and the public finances of the early American state, and the author of A Revolution in Favor of Government: The Making of the U.S. Constitution and the Origins of the American State (2003).

Todd Estes is Associate Professor of History at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan. He is the author of The Jay Treaty Debate, Public Opinion, and the Evolution of Early American Political Culture (2006) and has also published many other articles, essays, and reviews. In 2009 he was named a Distinguished Lecturer by the Organization of American Historians. He is currently working on a book about the public debates over the ratification of the Constitution.

Joanne B. Freeman is Professor of History at Yale University, specializing in the political culture of revolutionary and early national America. She is the author of the award-winning Affairs of Honor: National Politics in the New Republic (2001) and the editor of Alexander Hamilton: Writings (2001). A frequent lecturer at institutions and teaching institutes around the nation, she has contributed to numerous documentaries on PBS, the History Channel, and BBC Radio. Her current project is a study of congressional violence and the culture of Congress in antebellum America.

Annette Gordon-Reed is a Professor of Law and Professor of History at Harvard University. She is also the Carol K. Pforzheimer Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies at Harvard. Gordon-Reed is the author of, among other works, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy and The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family, for which she won the Pulitzer Prize for History and the National Book Award for Non-Fiction.

Kevin J. Hayes, Professor of English at the University of Central Oklahoma, is the author of several books, including The Road to Monticello: The Life and Mind of Thomas Jefferson (2008), The Mind of a Patriot: Patrick Henry and the World of Ideas (2008), and The Library of William Byrd of Westover (1997), for which he received the Virginia Library History Award from the Library of Virginia and the Virginia Center for the Book.

Catherine Kerrison is Associate Professor of History and Academic Director of Gender and Women’s Studies at Villanova University. The recipient of numerous research awards, she is the author of articles about gender and intellectual life in the early South, and of Claiming the Pen: Women and Intellectual Life in the Early American South (2006), winner of the Outstanding Book Award from the History of Education Society. She is currently working on her second book, “Jefferson’s Daughters.”

David Thomas Konig is Professor of History and Professor of Law at Washington University in St. Louis. He is co-editor with Michael Zuckert of The Legal Commonplace Book of Thomas Jefferson, series 2 of the Papers of Thomas Jefferson (forthcoming).

James P. McClure, a Senior Associate Editor of The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, has been a member of the project’s staff since 1996. He has lectured on Jefferson and science, the drafting of Jefferson’s first Annual Message to Congress, and the Kentucky Resolutions. He was previously an associate editor of the Salmon P. Chase Papers (5 vols, 1993–1998). With Peg A. Lamphier and Erika M. Kreger, he edited “Spur Up Your Pegasus”: Family Letters of Salmon, Kate, and Nettie Chase, 1844–1873 (2009).

Robert M.S. McDonald is Associate Professor of History at the United States Military Academy. He is a graduate of the University of Virginia, Oxford University, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he earned his PhD. He is editor of Thomas Jefferson’s Military Academy: Founding West Point and is completing a book to be titled Confounding Father: Thomas Jefferson and the Politics of Personality.

Michael A. McDonnell teaches in the Department of History at the University of Sydney. He has published articles on the American Revolution in the William and Mary Quarterly, the Journal of American History, and the Journal of American Studies, and is the author of The Politics of War: Race, Class, and Conflict in Revolutionary Virginia (Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2007). He is currently finishing a book on the French, Anishinaabe, and Métis communities of the Great Lakes, and starting a new project on “Memory, History and Nation-Making: The Revolution in American Life.”

Iain McLean is Professor of Politics at Oxford University and a fellow of Nuffield College. He has held visiting appointments at Washington and Lee, Stanford, Yale, and the Australian National universities. His interest in Thomas Jefferson goes back to his long-ago sabbatical at Washington and Lee, the slightly older cousin of Jefferson’s University of Virginia. It was rekindled in the late 1980s by work on Condorcet and the mathematics of democracy, when he discovered the remarkable encounter of Condorcet and Jefferson in Paris. While preparing this chapter he held visiting appointments at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (Paris) and the Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello. He is a Fellow of the British Academy.

Johann N. Neem is Associate Professor of History at Western Washington University. He is author of Creating a Nation of Joiners: Democracy and Civil Society in Early National Massachusetts (2008).

Barbara B. Oberg is General Editor of the Papers of Thomas Jefferson and a Lecturer with the Rank of Professor in the History Department at Princeton University. Before coming to the Jefferson Papers in 1999, she served for 12 years as Editor of the Papers of Benjamin Franklin at Yale University. She has co-edited two collections of essays, Benjamin Franklin, Jonathan Edwards, and the Representation of American Culture with Harry S. Stout (Oxford University Press, 1993) and Federalists Reconsidered with Doron Ben-Atar (University of Virginia Press, 1998). She has published many articles and reviews on the history of the early American republic and the craft of documentary editing. A former president of the Association for Documentary Editing and the Society of Historians of the Early American Republic, in 2008–2009 she was the R. Stanton Avery Distinguished Fellow at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California.

Peter S. Onuf is the Thomas Jefferson Foundation Professor of History at the University of Virginia. He is the author of many works on the history of the early American republic, including Jefferson’s Empire: The Language of American Nationhood (2000) and The Mind of Thomas Jefferson (2007).

Robert G. Parkinson is Assistant Professor of History at Shepherd University in Shepherdstown, West Virginia. His book, The Common Cause: Race, Nation, and the Consequences of Unity in the American Revolution, will be published in the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture series of the University of North Carolina Press.

Cassandra Pybus gained her PhD in History from the University of Sydney in 1977 where she now holds an Australian Research Council Professorial Fellowship. She was Fulbright Professor at Georgetown University in Washington DC in 2002, International Fellow at the International Center for Jefferson Studies in Virginia in 2003, and Visiting Professor at Institute of Historical Studies in Austin, Texas in 2007. Her interests span as broadly as Australian social history, colonial history in North America, South East Asia, Africa and Australia, slavery and she has published extensively on Australian, American, and Transatlantic history. Her most recent books are Epic Journeys of Freedom: Runaway Slaves of the American Revolution and their Global Quest for Liberty (Boston 2006) and, as co-editor, Many Middle Passages: Forced Migration in the Making of the Modern World (Berkeley 2007).

John A. Ragosta is a historian and lawyer who has published extensively in both legal and historical journals in the areas of early American history, constitutional law, and international relations. He practiced international trade law and litigation for 20 years in Washington DC and has taught at the George Washington University School of Law, the University of Virginia history department and law school, and Randolph College. He is the author of Wellspring of Liberty: How Virginia’s Religious Dissenters Helped Win the American Revolution and Secured Religious Liberty (2010).

Jack N. Rakove is the William Robertson Coe Professor of History and American Studies, and Professor of Political Science and (by courtesy) Law at Stanford University, where he has taught since 1980. He earned his BA in History from Haverford College in 1968, while also studying history at the University of Edinburgh, and completed his PhD at Harvard in 1975. He is the author of six books on the history of the American Revolution, including The Beginnings of National Politics (1979); Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution (1996); and Revolutionaries: A New History of the Invention of America (2010). Rakove also writes frequently on issues of constitutional interpretation. He is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.

Kristofer Ray is Assistant Professor of Early American History at Austin Peay State University and senior editor of the Tennessee Historical Quarterly. Between 2004 and 2006 he helped edit four volumes of The Papers of Thomas Jefferson: Retirement Series. His first book, Middle Tennessee, 1775–1825: Progress and Popular Democracy on the Southwestern Frontier, was published in 2007. He is currently researching issues of sovereignty, loyalty, and identity formation in the trans-Appalachian west, 1670–1800.

Leonard J. Sadosky is an independent scholar who holds a PhD from the University of Virginia (2003) and is a past fellow at both the Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello and Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of Revolutionary Negotiations: Indians, Empires, and Diplomats in the Founding of America (2009) and co-author with Peter S. Onuf of Jeffersonian America (2002).

Richard Samuelson is an Assistant Professor of history at California State University, San Bernardino. He has taught at or held fellowships at the University of Virginia, the University of Glasgow, the National University of Ireland, Galway, the University of Paris, 8, Claremont McKenna College, and Princeton University. He has published several essays on Jefferson, Adams, and the Adams–Jefferson correspondence, and is currently completing a book entitled John Adams and the Republic of Law. Dr. Samuelson received his PhD in American history from the University of Virginia.

Hannah Spahn is assistant professor at the John F. Kennedy-Institute for North American Studies at the Free University Berlin. She is author of Thomas Jefferson und die Sklaverei: Verrat an der Aufklärung? (2002) and Thomas Jefferson, Time, and History (2011).

Lucia Stanton is Shannon Senior Historian at Monticello. She is co-editor of Thomas Jefferson’s Memorandum Books (1997) and Jefferson Abroad (1999) and author of Free Some Day: The African-American Families of Monticello (2000) and articles on Jefferson and agriculture, science, and slavery.

Brian Steele is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. He is the author of “Thomas Jefferson’s Gender Frontier” (Journal of American History, June 2008) and of a forthcoming book on Jefferson’s nationalism.

Peter Thompson is Sydney L. Mayer University Lecturer in Early American History, University of Oxford and a Fellow of St. Cross College.

Billy L. Wayson holds a PhD from the University of Virginia. He brings his experiences in business, public policy, elected office, and farming to the study of cultural, social, and community history from mid-eighteenth century to the early antebellum period. His long-term project exploring a community of plantations in central Virginia currently focuses on Thomas Jefferson’s business finances, plantation management practices, and slave labor utilization.

Caroline Winterer is Professor in the Department of History at Stanford University. She is the author of The Culture of Classicism: Ancient Greece and Rome in American Intellectual Life, 1780–1910 (2002) and The Mirror of Antiquity: American Women and the Classical Tradition, 1750–1900 (2007).

Abbreviations

Memorandum Books: James A. Bear and Lucia C. Stanton (eds) Jefferson’s Memorandum Books, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997).

PTJ : Julian P. Boyd et al. (eds) The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 36 vols to date (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950-).

PTJ:RS: J. Jefferson Looney (ed.) The Papers of Thomas Jefferson: Retirement Series, 6 vols. to date (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004–).

TJ: Thomas Jefferson

TJP: The Thomas Jefferson Papers, 1607–1826, Library of Congress. http://rs6.loc.gov/ammem/collections/jefferson_papers/

TJW: Merrill D. Peterson (ed.) Thomas Jefferson: Writings (New York: Library of America, 1984).

Introduction

FRANCIS D. COGLIANO

On February 17, 1826 Thomas Jefferson wrote to his close friend James Madison. After discussing the appointment of a law professor for the University of Virginia, Jefferson lamented his crushing debts and outlined a lottery scheme which he hoped would solve the problem and save his home. At age eighty-two and in declining health, Jefferson was preoccupied with his legacy. He wrote to Madison, “It has … been a great solace to me, to believe that you are engaged in vindicating to posterity the course we have pursued for preserving to them, in all their purity, the blessings of self-government, which we have assisted too in acquiring for them.” Jefferson worried that future generations would forget, misconstrue, or misuse his historical legacy. He closed his letter with a plea that his friend “Take care of me when dead.” (TJ to James Madison, February 17, 1826, TJW, 1515)

Jefferson need not have worried. Although his reputation has waxed and waned over time he has not wanted for the attention of posterity. Since his death on July 4, 1826 biographers and historians have sought to come to grips with Jefferson. They have done so for a vast and interested audience of fellow scholars, politicians, and a general public that has a seemingly insatiable appetite for things Jeffersonian. Several examples illustrate the ubiquity of Jefferson and Jefferson’s image in contemporary America, and beyond. On March 17, 2009 a new play, Red-Haired Thomas by Robert Lyons debuted at New York’s Ohio Theater. Set on Manhattan’s West Side, the play “opens with a scene of a half-naked Thomas Jefferson who congratulates himself for having “fathered the most human of all human rights – and the most elusive: the right to pursue happiness.” He also claims to have fathered two singularly unhappy men: Cliff, “a delusional dreamer with a penchant for violence,” and Ifthikar, “an immigrant from Asia Minor who runs a newsstand.” The play examines modern New York life, terrorism, the global financial crisis, and family relationships through the men’s imagined relationship with Jefferson whom a reviewer in the New York Times described as “still our shiniest symbol of the democracy that some see as our most valuable export” (Soloski 2009, Gates 2009).

Several days after Red-Haired Thomas debuted in New York the right-wing Republican congresswoman from Minnesota, Michelle Bachmann, invoked Jefferson to call for armed resistance to the Obama administration. “I want the people in Minnesota armed and dangerous,” she said, on the “issue of the energy tax because we need to fight back. Thomas Jefferson told us, having a revolution every now and then is a good thing, and the people – we the people – are going to have to fight back hard if we’re not going to lose our country. And I think this has the potential of changing the dynamic of freedom forever in the United States” (Grandia 2009, emphasis in original).

Enthusiasm for Jefferson is not confined to the United States. On March 10, 2009 a blogger for London’s Daily Telegraph published a series of quotations from Jefferson concerning freedom of religion after advertisements appeared on buses in London and Seattle favoring atheism (Spence 2009). Several days later Modern Ghana News cited the example of Jefferson’s bitterly contested 1800 election and his (eventual) reconciliation with his opponent John Adams to argue for a similar reconciliation between Ghana’s New Patriotic Party and the National Democratic Congress (Damptey 2009). On April 5, 2009 in a column condemning greed Shmuley Boteach argued in The Jerusalem Post that Jefferson’s positive view of human nature had prevailed over Alexander Hamilton’s more pessimistic interpretation. “I was raised to believe,” wrote Boteach, “that an open democratic society is built on the belief that people are ultimately trustworthy. Did not Thomas Jefferson wage a pitched battle against Alexander Hamilton, the first secretary of the treasury, about the goodness inherent in individuals, with Jefferson’s vision winning out?” (Boteach 2009). On April 17, 2009 The Australian newspaper declared that President Obama is a “modern-day Jefferson” (O’Connor 2009). Each of these writers, on four different continents, presumed their readers would understand their references to Jefferson and grasp his contemporary relevance. What is striking is that Jefferson retains a powerful contemporary relevance. Jefferson is unique in his appeal to pundits, politicians, policy-makers, bloggers, writers of letters-to-the-editor, and ordinary people in the United States and beyond. It is difficult, for example, to imagine a contemporary British prime minister invoking William Pitt in an effort to win support for his or her policies or using “Gladstonian” as a shorthand for all that is good about British political values.

Against the context of intense public enthusiasm, books about Jefferson and his time continue to appear inexorably. In 1960 Merrill D. Peterson wrote, “The knowledge of Jefferson possessed by some recent scholars surpasses that of his most intimate contemporaries (if there were any who were genuinely intimate with that reserved man). Their works have achieved a more richly textured and, as the candid observer must feel, a truer image of than in his time” (Peterson 1960, 446). A half-century later, Peterson’s words still ring true. Owing to access to digital resources as well as the publication of The Papers of Thomas Jefferson by Princeton University Press students of Jefferson and his time have access to an increasingly wide array of primary source material. This has made possible the publication of an ever increasing (and increasingly sophisticated) scholarship on Jefferson, which this volume seeks to analyze and contribute to.

In October 1992 Peter S. Onuf, the Thomas Jefferson Foundation Professor at the University of Virginia, organized a six-day conference to commemorate the 250th anniversary of Jefferson’s birth. Arising from that conference was an essay collection, Jeffersonian Legacies, which presented fifteen essays by leading scholars focusing on different aspects of Jefferson’s life and legacy. Jeffersonian Legacies quickly became a landmark in Jefferson scholarship. Nearly a generation has passed since its publication (Jefferson considered a generation to be 19 years in length). The present volume can be read as a sequel to Jeffersonian Legacies, which aims to take stock of the vast and growing scholarly literature on Jefferson and to offer fresh insights from leading scholars on Jefferson and his time. It is organized into three sections. The first contains essays that follow a roughly chronological format and trace Jefferson’s life, major writings, and public career. The second section, of equal length, provides detailed consideration of important themes that run through Jefferson’s life and the scholarly literature. The third, briefer, section presents a series of essays on Jefferson’s legacy – including Jefferson’s effort at fashioning his own legacy as well as the institutions, notably the Papers of Thomas Jefferson and the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, which have shaped our understanding of Jefferson’s complex legacy. It is not possible to get the last word on Jefferson. This volume is intended to contribute to an ongoing (and never-ending) colloquy on Jefferson and his time.

This volume is dedicated to the memory of Professor Frank Shuffelton, an eminent scholar of Jefferson. Frank was to have contributed an essay to this volume, but was prevented from doing so by his untimely death. This collection is the poorer for its absence. Frank provided encouragement, support, and friendship to numerous scholars, including many of those whose essays appear in this volume.

References

Boteach, S. (2009) No holds barred: The Rebbe and the remedy for greed, Jerusalem Post, April 5, 2009, www.jpost.com

Damptey, D. D. (2009) We shall overcome … but when? Modern Ghana News (Accra), www.modernghana.com, March 13, 2009.

Gates, A. (2009) City life gets a bit Jeffersonian, New York Times, March 18, 2009, www.nytimes.com

Grandia, K. (2009) Republican Rep Michele Bachmann’s over-the-top nonsense, March 24, 2009, www.desmogblog.com (accessed March 30, 2009).

O’Connor, B. (2009) Obama as a modern-day Jefferson. The Australian (Sydney), April 17, 2009, www.theaustralian.news.com.au

Peterson, M.D. (1960, repr. 1998) The Jefferson Image in the American Mind. Oxford University Press, New York; University Press of Virginia, Charlottesville.

Soloski, A. (2009) A Founding Father prowls the Ohio theater stage in Red-Haired Thomas. The Village Voice, March 18, 2009, www.villagevoice.com

Spencer, N. (2009) What quotation would you choose?, http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk, March 9, 2009, accessed March 10, 2009.

PART I

Jefferson’s Life and Times

CHAPTER ONE

Jefferson and Biography

ANNETTE GORDON-REED

It was the fate of Thomas Jefferson to be at once more loved and praised by his friends, and more hated and reviled by his adversaries than any of his compatriots. Time has produced less abatement of these feelings towards him than is usual; and, contrary to the maxim which invokes charity for the dead, the maledictions of his enemies have of late years been more frequent and loud than the commendations of his friends.

George Tucker, 1837

The argument never ceases. Just who was Thomas Jefferson and what is he – what should he be – to us? Attempts to answer that question began soon after Jefferson drew his last breath on July 4, 1826. His family made the first move with the publication in 1829 of four volumes’ worth of Jefferson’s writings and correspondence. The biographers soon followed, creating narratives that put their own cast on his legacy, hoping to shape posterity’s opinion on where the Virginian should fit in the American pantheon or, sometimes, whether he should be in it at all. From the 1830s until today, the full-length biographies, single- and multi-volume, have poured forth.

It is safe to say that no president besides Lincoln has been the subject of more intense, and varied, investigation. People who love Jefferson have written about him, as have those who loathed him, along with those who are simply deeply conflicted. Like all biographies and written histories, these works are the products of the times in which they were crafted. Some have been more influential and important than others. Because of their talent, or exquisite timing, the authors of those particular volumes managed to use their cultural moment to create a picture of Jefferson that captured the imagination of contemporary readers and, perhaps more importantly, of the historians and biographers who would follow them. Their work covers the field until another strong effort comes to take its place.

The field of Jefferson studies can usefully be divided into three eras, dominated by biographies that were judged the leading word, the “definitive” treatment of Jefferson for that particular age, with the expectation that the book’s influence would continue far into the future. This is not to say that there were not many fine biographies or books about Jefferson written during these same periods, it is to suggest that the research, insights, and conclusions of the defining books had a greater impact on the field than others. Even though it was not the first biography of Jefferson, the nineteenth century, well into the mid-twentieth century, was the era of Henry S. Randall’s Life of Thomas Jefferson, published in 1858. Randall’s work set the tone for writing about Jefferson for his time and influenced generations of biographers who succeeded him up to the present. After Randall came Dumas Malone, who began his majestic six-volume study, Jefferson and His Time, in the 1940s and ended it in the early 1980s. Though not totally eclipsed, the Malone era has been in decline with the rise of more specialized and focused considerations of aspects of Jefferson’s life. Jefferson biography has splintered into a seemingly endless number of fragments. From the 1960s until today we have lived in the era of “Jefferson and” – Jefferson and slavery, Jefferson and women, Jefferson and the character question. Even as these specialized studies have enriched our understanding of Jefferson, they remind us of the need for a comprehensive treatment that puts the man whole again after all that we have learned from the many sophisticated studies of individuals aspects of his life and attitudes.

What follows is a description and analysis of the progression of Jefferson biography from the earliest time until today, with a particular emphasis on the most influential works. But before Jefferson biographies there was, of course, Jefferson himself. He is at the heart of every attempt to fashion a narrative of his life, not merely because he is the biographical subject at hand, but because he tried to so hard to make historians the object of his influence. Any consideration of the history of Jefferson biographies must begin with him.

The Pitch

It would be hard to imagine any figure in history more self-conscious about his legacy than Thomas Jefferson. From the time he burst onto the scene as a young revolutionary, he had good reason to believe that he would live on in history. He had played an integral role in a movement that had successfully defeated what was at the time the most powerful nation on the earth: Great Britain. As his star in the leadership cadre of the new nation continued to rise, he had even more reason to feel certain that later generations would know his name.

This was not only what Jefferson expected, it was what he very much wanted, and in this he was little different from the other well-known members of his revolutionary cohort. In his influential work, Fame and the Founding Fathers, the historian Douglass Adair cited fame as a key motivator for many members of the founding generation (see Colbourn 1974). It helped shaped their sense of themselves and guided their actions during their lifetimes as they, anachronistically, reached across the centuries and tried to model themselves after the famous men of ancient western civilizations, the Greeks and Romans, and, when the situation warranted, resorted to a mythical Anglo-Saxon past. That made sense, given that they were also scouring history looking for templates for the new republic they wanted to create: one that would stake its own claim on the future. Just as in ancient times, the men who made the American republic would have to have the character to pull it off – or at least be seen as having the character to do so. But it was not celebrity during their lifetimes that mattered; the much longed-for goal was fame in posterity.

Jefferson biographer Fawn Brodie observed that “Jefferson had a superb sense of history and an exact understanding of his own role in it” (Brodie 1974, 22). As one who read history and appreciated its pivotal role in determining what later generations felt about events and people of the past, Jefferson realized that his legacy would ultimately be in the hands of historians. How would they go about making their judgments? What material would they use to assess the meaning of his life’s work and those of the other American Revolutionaries? “Who will write the history of the American Revolution?” John Adams asked Jefferson during one exchange in their famous late-in-life correspondence. “Nobody; except it’s (sic) external facts,” Jefferson responded. Then he explained. The men who made the Revolution – including himself – kept sparse, if any notes, about what was going on. Therefore, their thoughts, feelings, and motivations at the time, which was “the life and soul of history must forever be unknown” (John Adams to TJ and Thomas McKean, July 30, 1815; TJ to John Adams, August 10[11], 1815, in Cappon 1959, 2: 451, 452).

Jefferson’s answer to Adams about the American Revolution presents a telling window into his thoughts on the nature and substance of history overall. As the historian Francis Cogliano has noted, Jefferson believed that in order for history to “retain its power and significance,” it had to be based upon primary sources (Cogliano 2006). Documentary evidence, written by the people who were involved in the events, or were the subjects of historical inquiry, provided the chief, if not only, means for getting at the real truth of what had gone on in the past. This conception of history as necessarily coming from the actual participants describing what actions they took and, perhaps, expressing their thoughts and feelings about events as they were unfolding formed the basis for Jefferson’s understanding of how to present himself to posterity. If historians were to be his judges, he wanted to address them and influence their project as much as possible. With this philosophy in mind, he set out to establish what he wanted to be the historical truth of his life, even as he drew sharp limits around what parts of his life were to be included in the historical record.

Of course, many histories of the Revolution have been written – and good ones too. The documentary record is more extensive than Jefferson knew of or imagined. In addition, the understanding of the kinds of things that could be a part of the record has greatly expanded. Perhaps it is here that models from ancient history most poorly served Jefferson’s understanding of what was likely to happen when future historians wrote about him and his times. The words of non-elite men, women, and slaves have been added to the mixture of the attempt to tell the story of America’s origins. History is no longer simply what great men did, said they did, and their explanation for why they did it. As a result the ground has shifted decisively underneath Jefferson’s historical feet. Even without that shift, Jefferson’s statement about the primacy of documentary records does not get at the true heart of the historical enterprise, or how responsible historians go about shaping the legacies of historical figures.

What historians lack in firsthand experience of their subject matter, they more than make up for with the twenty-twenty vision of hindsight and the capacity to play the omniscient observer – to analyze the Rashomon-like narratives that always exist whenever multiple people are involved in an unfolding story. After considering all viewpoints they are, at least, in the position to come to a reasonable conclusion about the relative reliability of the often competing and contradictory stories. Every individual in Jefferson’s cohort experienced that time in his or her own way and, thus, had his or her own version of the truth. Jefferson well understood that it was the historian’s job to interpret the documentary record, to consider the evidence as presented, and to arrive at reliable conclusions about the past, and he was withering when he came upon historians who failed at the task. There is also little doubt that his tendency to divide the world up into the forces of good (truth) and the forces of evil (falsehood) led Jefferson to believe that with strategic prompting – particularly, his strategic prompting – future historians (who undoubtedly would be living in a more progressive and enlightened time) would recognize the truth as he saw it.

But what form would the prompts take? What could he leave behind to tell the story of himself and his times in the way it needed to be told? He could leave his own words, created in the moment that would give future generations the facts about his era and allow them to see his thoughts and reactions to all the events that mattered. Unlike other prominent men of the time, Jefferson did not, as a general rule, keep a journal, which would seem a logical thing to have done for one so keen on speaking directly to generations in the future. The closest he came to keeping a diary was the Anas, his record of his days as Secretary of State in the Washington administration. Jefferson’s initial reason for keeping the notes of his conversations with other members of the cabinet fit perfectly with his belief in the critical importance of contemporary accounts of historical events. And make no mistake; Jefferson knew that what was going on in the Washington administration would be seen as historic. What Jefferson later did with the Anas – revise it and add to it based on his later recollections – and why he did so, show that by the end of his life he well understood the threat that competing narratives in history could pose for his legacy and for later generations’ understanding of what went on in the early American republic. One description of Jefferson’s writings in the Anas suggests why he did not resort to this form more generally.

In these diary notes – vivid, racy, almost prehensile in the way they reach out for the target – Jefferson emerges as a political rhetorician of no mean power, using a salty vocabulary of epithet. We see him at a level considerably below the lofty plane of disinterested public servant that formed his self image. He seems too familiar with the wiles, cabals, and maneuvers of his enemies to convince the reader that this is alien territory to him.

(Lerner 1996, 138)

To the extent that Jefferson wanted historians to accept his own image of himself, the Jefferson of the Anas was almost certainly not his preferred presentation. The exigencies of the moment – he redid the Anas in response to the completion and publication of John Marshall’s five-volume biography of George Washington, which he considered to be so much Federalist inspired propaganda – were such that he could not restrain himself. He felt that he could not pass up the chance to set the record straight while settling some old scores with his nemesis Alexander Hamilton along the way. One could speculate that Jefferson was not entirely comfortable with the idea of keeping a daily record of his reflections on circumstances outside of his political life. Journal-keeping creates the greater chance for informality, and informality carries the risk of the unintended revelation. A Jefferson diary, the kind of thing any student of Jefferson would love to have in hand, might reveal way more of himself than he cared to share with posterity, even if he were as circumspect as possible.

Jefferson’s most direct attempt to communicate with later generations was his autobiography begun in 1821 at the age of seventy-seven. He claimed that writing the Autobiography was intended for his “own ready reference and for the information of his family” (Ford 1914, 3). But surely such a thing would not have to be published, and Jefferson’s voice throughout the document suggests that he expected the book to be read by others beside his family. It is a fairly perfunctory affair, in terms of the information provided, the length, and the time he spent on it. After only several months, he abandoned the effort. It begins with a maddeningly terse account of his family history and ends in 1790 with his arrival in New York to take up his role as Secretary of State after finishing his time abroad as Minister to France. Jefferson lived another thirty-six years after that, years that he evidently did not care to describe in autobiographical form. His heart was not in it. At one point he says flatly, “I am already tired of talking about myself” (Ford 1914, 78).

If Jefferson did not wish to reveal his life in a series of daily reflections or by simply writing a straightforward narrative, he had another means. Letters were his preferred mode of presentation to the audience of the future. He believed that “the letters of a person, especially of one whose business has been chiefly transacted by letters, form the only full and genuine journal of his life.” This bit of Jeffersonian hyperbole – the only full and genuine journal – fit perfectly with his ideas about the proper way to prepare oneself for history. His letters, written in the daily course of his life would give “real time” information to later generations about the things they needed to know. Written while the issues discussed were fresh in the mind, they would be more accurate than an autobiography written, sometimes, long after the salient events occurred. Jefferson’s explanation for the superiority of letters as the medium for telling a life story neatly circumscribes the boundaries of what would be presented. The words “business” and “transacted” immediately signal that the professional, rather than personal life was to be the primary focus.

Jefferson thought that biographies of great men should be about their public lives, the domestic sphere having no real place in the record except insofar as it intersected with the public life. Marriage was a public event, and therefore, it made sense to mention his wife, Martha, in his Autobiography and refer to her illness as a reason for not initially accepting the new government’s commission to go to France in the early 1780s. In 1817, when a man who was thinking of writing a life of Jefferson wrote to ask for the names of Jefferson’s grandchildren, Jefferson responded that he did not want to bore the public with information that had nothing to do with his life as a public man; the reason he was being written about in the first place (TJ to Joseph Delaplaine, April 12, 1817, TJP).

It is not as though there was no precedent for consideration of, or interest in, the private lives of famous people. The goings on among the royalty of Europe were of great interest to members of the public – marriages, mistresses, and children, legitimate and not – were all fodder for conversation. Jefferson himself was interested in this too. George Ticknor, then a professor at Harvard, visited Jefferson in retirement. Ticknor, who in this instance comes across as quite priggish, was a little dismayed to see that Jefferson had a fondness for what Ticknor called “documents of regal scandal,” a memoir detailing the private escapades of figures of royalty. Ticknor felt it beneath Jefferson to be interested in gossip. But he was, probably like most people, interested in the lives of other human beings. His letters often contain information about the private lives of his cohort. There he is in 1784 gossiping to James Madison about the middle-aged Arthur Lee courting a 17-year-old heiress. Writing from Paris, he instructed a correspondent to tell him those who die, so that he would not be surprised upon his return, “who marry, who hang themselves because they cannot marry” (Gordon-Reed 2008, 310; TJ to Eliza House Trist, August 15, 1785, quoted in Brodie 1974, 185–186).

And Jefferson was being disingenuous when he offered that members of the public would be bored reading about his domestic life. He knew that people wanted to know the details behind the scenes at Monticello. From the 1790s on, his neighbors gossiped about his relationship with Sally Hemings and her background as his wife’s half-sister. Newspapers openly speculated about how these tangled relations may have affected Jefferson and his legal white daughters (Gordon-Reed 2008, 90, 554–561). In a world where interracial sex was punished by law and social opprobrium, details about his life at Monticello had splashed onto front pages all over the country beginning in 1802. His resounding re-election in 1804 certainly gave evidence that it was what he had done for the country up until that point, and what he said he pledged to do in the future, that was of chief concern to most Americans, not making a judgment about him based upon the way he lived on his mountain. Of course, being unwilling to make a negative judgment was not the same as being uninterested. Talk about this aspect of Jefferson’s life continued until his death, and endured beyond it. This, of course, was never a subject that would appear in his own letters.

The result of Jefferson’s lifelong presentation of himself in letters was the creation of a staggering epistolary record of nearly 18 000 documents. Because his letters to people prompted responses, we are able to see how others interpreted Jefferson and his words. The letters are not all business, but they do amount to a carefully, sometimes exquisitely, crafted recounting of Jefferson’s life as a public man – a near perfect gift for historians employing the traditional method of immersion in primary documents. He had done his part – gone as far as he was willing to go – to help prepare for history’s judgment. When he died, on July 4, 1826, matters were out of his hands.

The Responses

Although Henry Randall’s Life of Thomas Jefferson dominated in the nineteenth century, he was not the first to write a full-length biography of Jefferson. B.L. Rayner’s work, with the same title as Randall’s, appeared in 1834. Though that book has largely been forgotten, it should be mentioned simply because it was the first to present Jefferson’s life from the cradle to the grave. Probably because of his connection with the University of Virginia and his great stature, George Tucker, a professor of Moral Philosophy at Jefferson’s university, is often cited as Jefferson’s first serious biographer and, though his work is nowhere near as well known as Randall’s, Tucker helped set the tone for nearly all Jefferson studies to come. Writing in 1837, Tucker recognized the immediate problem with Jefferson as a subject, and it was a problem that Jefferson was very much attuned to: the Virginian was a deeply controversial figure, no less so as the years passed and new generations of leaders sought to define themselves as descendants of the revolutionary generation. Jefferson’s time as the head of the Republican Party left an indelible stamp on him and his career. The feelings about him in the country – among those who had an opinion – tended toward the extreme: he was either loved or hated. Tucker wrote in his preface, “the author was … aware that in undertaking to write the life of one, who was the object of such lively and opposite sentiments, he engaged in a hazardous task. He knew that with one portion of the public, any praise would be distasteful; and that with another portion, nothing less than an unvarying strain of eulogy would prove satisfactory” (Tucker 1837, 1: vii).

It would probably be irrational to expect that the University of Virginia professor Tucker would be able to see Jefferson in a neutral light. And, sure enough, despite his rejection of the “unvarying strain of eulogy” approach to writing about Jefferson, Tucker was clear about his aim in telling Jefferson’s story. He believed “that of all our public men, the greatest injustice had been done to Mr. Jefferson; that the prejudice felt towards him would be naturally extended to his opinions; and that in the vehemence, perseverance and ability with which he had been assailed, injury was likely to be done to the cause of political truth and sound principles.” Anticipating later Jefferson biographer, James Parton’s famous pronouncement, “If Jefferson was wrong, America is wrong. If Jefferson was right, American is right” (Parton 1874, iii), Tucker collapsed the man into the country, or he correctly discerned that many in the country might use their view of Jefferson himself – the way he conducted himself as a politician, the crafty operator of the Anas mentioned above – as an excuse to reject the principles for which he stood.

Tucker’s approach was made necessary by the 1829 publication of an edition of Jefferson’s papers. Jefferson had left his epistolary record as a legacy to his eldest grandson, Thomas Jefferson Randolph. As part of the family’s effort to raise money to pay down the debt that had overwhelmed Jefferson at the end of his life, Randolph decided to publish the papers after his mother and sisters had diligently transcribed the documents that they were willing to make public. Although he left out letters that might be incendiary – criticisms of George Washington, other political figures, and the correspondence with James Callender who first wrote publically about his grandfather’s relationship with Sally Hemings, there was still enough in the letters to reopen old political wounds.

Despite the fact that Randolph had given him access to all of Jefferson’s papers and cooperated fully with him, Tucker was blunt to the point of insult about his feeling that the family erred in publishing many of the letters. He came perilously close to calling them stupid for having done so.

For the want of caution in making that publication, owing, it is presumed to a mistaken opinion of the claims of the public, the ill-will which had been felt against Mr. Jefferson as the leader of his party received a fresh impetus, and was in some measure imparted to a new generation. In the warmth of their resentment, his unreserved communications to confidential friends have been regarded as if they had been deliberately written by him for the press; and the ebullitions of feeling, uttered when the fever of party excitement was at its height, and when he was goaded by every species of provocation, have been considered as the settled convictions of his mind.

(Tucker 1837, 1: viii)

Tucker simply did not believe that Jefferson would have wanted a good many of the letters in Randolph’s volume published. Publishing them sent the wrong message – that Jefferson was, in effect, deliberately picking a fight from the grave. That was not correct, Tucker argued. The Sage was not sending a message to anyone by publishing these letters, because the decision to do so was made by Thomas Jefferson Randolph. The Anas was one thing. Jefferson clearly wanted to get that into the public arena “in defense of himself and his party, at the discretion of his executor… But, for the selection of the letters for publication from the mass of his voluminous correspondence, Mr. Randolph and the friends he consulted are alone responsible” (Tucker 1837, 1: ix). It was not so much that the letters were published, it was that they were published so soon after Jefferson’s death, when some of the political controversies surrounding his public life were still fresh. So, Tucker approached his project as if he were on a rescue mission.

Unlike Raynor, Tucker was given access to all of Jefferson’s papers, even the ones that remained unpublished. He worked closely with Jefferson’s friend and political compatriot, James Madison, consulted with members of Jefferson’s family, and scoured the public record. The result was a two-volume set that, generally, followed Jefferson’s prescription for how biographies of political figures should be written, with an almost total focus on his life as a public man, making only token forays into the more personal aspects of his life. To the extent that Tucker got personal, it was always with material that was relatively “safe.” For example, he included letters that Jefferson wrote as a young man pining away for the affections of Rebecca Burwell. While this was certainly intimate, and presented a side of Jefferson that had not been shown before, no one could hold these youthful effusions against him. Neither the words Maria Cosway nor “Sally” appear in the book, though Tucker mounted a vigorous defense of Jefferson’s “private life” never once stating with specificity why any defense was necessary (Tucker 1837, 2:127–8). One can speculate that Jefferson would have been generally happy with his first brush with a historian’s scrutiny.

Jefferson’s second major brush with history came when Henry S. Randall, published his three-volume work, The Life of Thomas Jefferson