Habits of Mastery

In their provocative new book, Annette Gordon-Reed and Peter Onuf take aim at the famous warning of Henry Adams that it was necessary to sketch Thomas Jefferson with a fine pencil rather than a broad brush, that the shades of any sketch would flicker and fade in shifting light and perspective. Such mystifications, they warn, are more obscuring than illuminating. If we explain the contradictions of Jefferson’s life as a “progressive patriarch” (p. xv) and slaveholder with reference only to his deep eccentricity and complicated psychology, we are effectively excusing the rest of a country founded and grounded in white supremacy. This is a point well taken, and well made. The wager of the book is that Jefferson can be understood, and if anyone is to do that understanding, it is these two historians. Gordon-Reed, the Charles Warren Professor of American Legal History at Harvard Law School, and Onuf, the Thomas Jefferson Foundation Professor of History Emeritus at the University of Virginia, have devoted their careers, thus far, to undoing the spell that Jefferson’s shimmering image has cast on the American historical imagination and to situating him in context. Their book is the product of that endeavor, and it accomplishes more in the way of reconstructing Jefferson’s lived reality than any other biography of him. That alone is a signal achievement.

To combat two tendencies in the intellectual history of Jefferson scholarship most often associated with Merrill Peterson’s Thomas Jefferson and the New Nation and The Jefferson Image in the American Mind, they make two decisive methodological choices that shape the entire narrative arc of the book. In order to get away from both the impenetrable-shiftiness paradigm and a related tradition of treating Jefferson’s image or legacy as equally complex and incapable of being pinned down, Gordon-Reed and Onuf posit a readable, classifiable, and transparent Jefferson. To deliver that Jefferson, they decide, first, to take him largely at face value—”at his word about his beliefs, goals, and motivations”—and so, secondly, view him to be a relatively stable way of looking into the wider world of race and politics in the early republic rather than as the perpetual eccentric he has been taken to be (p. xx). They have great confidence in their ability to look, and it should be said that such confidence has been earned.

If there is a criticism to be made here, it is not just that there are costs as well as benefits to taking Jefferson as an easily readable figure whose significance in history and obsessive record-keeping conveniently allow us to see things about the past that we might not otherwise see. Rather, it is that the authors miss an opportunity to think more openly about what it means to be studying him in the present and why one would bother doing so in the first place. Given that they have, no doubt, done such thinking at great length, it might be better to say that they miss an opportunity to let their readers in on this thinking. As a result, an often productive but persistent tension emerges over the course of the book. On the one hand, taking Jefferson at his word about himself risks leaving him a little too much in control of what can be said and done with him today; at some points in the book, Jefferson’s formulations are left surprisingly unpacked. On the other hand, to see Jefferson as a self-possessed and relatively transparent reflection of his time and place leaves him with mastery, but not a lot of agency—and that image itself was, of course, part of his formulation, if not entirely of his own invention. His depiction of himself as an ancient patriarch serves as a key to his life throughout the book, but that self-styling was compatible, for Jefferson, with a particular kind of faith in the directionality of history...