Jefferson’s Spaces

Thomas Jefferson presents daunting obstacles to biographers. Historian Merrill Peterson famously called Jefferson “impenetrable,” echoing the complaints of visitors to Monticello who were denied access to the great man’s private suite, or “sanctum sanctorum” (Thomas Jefferson viii). Jefferson customarily diverted his guests’ attention away from himself, inviting them to enjoy the magnificent views, imagine what Monticello might look like if construction were ever completed, and contemplate the statues, paintings, prints, maps, Indian artifacts, and other conversation pieces that filled the house to overflowing. Granddaughter Ellen Randolph called life at her childhood home a “feast of reason,” but there were limits to the feast. Jefferson usually declined to participate in contentious and divisive arguments about politics or other topics that might lead him to express controversial opinions or principles; his manner undoubtedly discouraging others from doing so. Nor did he bare his soul, even to family members or close friends. “To a disposition ardent, affectionate and communicative,” reported Margaret Bayard Smith, who adored him, “he joins manners timid, even to bashfulness and reserved even to coldness” (Hayes, Jefferson 60). Jefferson’s perceived chilliness was “unfavorable to that free interchange of thoughts and feelings which constitute the greatest charm of social life” (Hunt 386). Surely the “greatest charm” of a modern biography is the secrets it betrays, and modern subjects seem all too eager to tell all. But Jefferson had a gift for turning the conversation away from himself, Smith concluded, “so as to draw forth the powers and talents of each guest” (Bayard Smith). Jefferson has a similar gift with modern biographers, often turning efforts to penetrate their subject’s defenses into righteous self-posturing.

The temptation to knock Jefferson off his pedestal and so reveal the hypocrisy of a slaveholder who wrote the script for our democratic creed has been nearly irresistible. The “real” Jefferson must have been a moral monster: his penchant for privacy a mere device to hide a flawed “character” that cannot bear scrutiny. Instead of being his claim to eternal esteem, the eloquent language of the Declaration of Independence—“all men are created equal”—constitutes an everlasting indictment of him. The books under review here suggest that the time is ripe for a less moralistic—and self-congratulatory—approach to Jefferson’s life. Such an approach cannot evade the harsh realities of chattel slavery and white supremacy: no truthful portrait of the master of Monticello can ever successfully extricate him from the slave society that sustained his wealth and influence and made his career as a revolutionary patriot and republican statesman possible. Indeed taking Jefferson seriously on his own terms requires acknowledging the ways in which all aspects of his life made him who he was, and shaped how he presented himself to others, including his family, the people he enslaved, and visitors to his mountain.

Jefferson’s family and the enslaved knew all about life in a slave society, of course, understanding that the master had to develop a persona that allowed him to play his designated role. And the visitors to Monticello whose testimony is included in Kevin J. Hayes’s engaging Jefferson in His Own Time were of course well aware that Jefferson exploited large numbers of his fellow human beings.¹ They might have wondered whether (and how) the author of Notes on the State of Virginia, with its trenchant denunciations of slavery, could sustain his faith in the imminence—or at least inevitability—of emancipation, and the topic was occasionally broached in parlor or dining room conversations. But they could have no doubts that, in the meantime, Jefferson lived easily with slavery, or that slave labor was...