Seeing Jefferson Anew: In His Time and Ours

Afterword

Andrew J. O’Shaughnessy Afterword The past decade has witnessed a resurgence of popular interest in the lives of the Founders with best-selling biographies by authors like David G. McCullough, Joseph J. Ellis, Ron Chernow, and Walter Isaacson. However, the celebratory tone of such books is rarely found in modern works on Thomas Je√erson. Indeed, in venerating his opponents and rivals, these biographers are often hostile in their treatment of Je√erson. The disparity is further widened by the iconoclastic scholarship on Je√erson that is expressed at its most extreme by the work of Conor Cruise O’Brien, who notoriously likened Je√erson to Pol Pot. As Peter S. Onuf notes in the first essay of this volume, it was inevitable that the hagiographical tradition of Dumas Malone would su√er in the wake of the civil rights movement and the growing evidence that Je√erson fathered at least one and probably all of Sally Hemings’s children. Furthermore, Je√erson’s posthumous reputation has traditionally been subject to vagaries and cycles, as has been so well demonstrated by Merrill D. Peterson and more recently by Francis D. Cogliano. It is nevertheless ironic that Je√erson should be so diminished since he, more than even James Madison and certainly the Federalists , had an unwavering faith in the capacity of the people to govern themselves, and he embraced more readily than most of his illustrious contemporaries the post-Revolutionary changes in America. As Gordon S. Wood demonstrates in his Radicalism of the 196 Andrew J. O’Shaughnessy American Revolution, the elite of Je√erson’s generation became disillusioned by the more democratic demeanor of society in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Je√erson’s presidency appealed to this new ethos with its informality of style and absence of ostentation. In this volume of essays of reappraisal by some of the foremost scholars of Je√erson, the authors variously express frustration with the current state of the scholarship and suggest the need for a major reevaluation of Je√erson that seeks to go beyond merely treating him as contradictory and hypocritical and rather places him in historical context and avoids the implicit anachronism of much of the current historiography. Onuf warns that Je√erson will continue to remain obscure as long as we continue to define him in relation to ourselves rather than in relation to his contemporaries. It is also of related interest that the authors in this volume do not even mention what seemed a relentless debate regarding the ideological influences on Je√erson. There is here much less emphasis on ideology and more attention to specific circumstances that influenced his behavior. The Je√erson who emerges is less static than in most portrayals and is seen to have evolved and reacted to events. Eva Sheppard Wolf describes a traditional provincial member of the Virginia elite who reluctantly turned revolutionary and only gradually embraced the political ideas for which he is remembered. She notes several turning points in his career, placing particular importance on the severance of ties with Britain and the partisan politics of the 1790s. She writes of him adjusting to new realities and as being more concerned with the practice than the theory of politics. Peter J. Kastor demonstrates that Je√erson was far from thinking in terms of sea to shining sea in his treatment of the West. Indeed, in his Mississippi policy between 1801 and 1803, he expressly rejected the acquisition of territory in the Far West and even considered trading major portions of the Louisiana Purchase for territory on the Gulf Coast. Kastor finds that Je√erson’s experience of policymaking in the West gradually transformed his thinking about Native Ameri- Afterword 197 cans. Thomas E. Buckley makes a convincing case for the influence of the Reverend James Maury on Je√erson. As a child, Je√erson had lodged in the home of this remarkable individual. Buckley has a particularly fascinating account of Maury’s attempt to baptize some black slaves before his white congregation. These authors do not attempt to gloss over the current critical view of Je√erson. The issues they discuss are certainly the most controversial of his career rather than the more comfortable topics, such as his intellectual activities or his horticultural interests. They indeed contain necessary qualifications of our appreciation of his legacy. Kastor shows how...