Seeing Jefferson Anew: In His Time and Ours

Introduction

Introduction In a readily understandable way, history is—as one definition has it—a conversation between the present and the past. Such a definition suggests that as present concerns and issues change, then the nature of the conversation will change too. New questions will be asked, old assumptions will be reexamined, and current perspectives will shed fresh light on what once were considered settled opinions. For that reason, revisionism, much maligned in the popular mind, is the meat and potatoes of history. Every topic, person, and event of significance is subject to constant restudy: new methodologies are employed, recently discovered evidence is brought to bear, di√erent questions are asked, and contemporary assessments and attitudes toward a variety of issues often render previously accepted historical judgments problematical. All historical interpretations become more complex as new ones are not so much overlaid on older interpretations as placed beside them. Surely no one in American history has been subjected to a greater range of interpretations than has Thomas Je√erson. Merrill D. Peterson’s brilliant study, The Je√erson Image in the American Mind, now fifty years old, showed how history had treated Je√erson over the past generations and how di√erent he had looked to di√erent observers at di√erent times. Je√erson has been, in Peterson’s words, ‘‘a sensitive reflector, through several generations, of America ’s troubled search for the image of itself.’’ ‘‘More than any other 2 John B. Boles and Randal L. Hall American,’’ Peterson concludes, Je√erson ‘‘impressed himself on the nation’s future.’’∞ Je√erson’s image has been on a historical roller-coaster ride since Peterson’s book appeared. When that book came out in 1960, scholars as well as the general public were laying aside critical older studies of Je√erson by Henry Adams and others and were instead reading the equally magnificent series of respectful volumes that Dumas Malone was turning out. Two volumes of this biography had been published by 1960, and over the next two decades four additional hefty volumes were published.≤ Malone took Je√erson’s greatness as a given and wrote life-and-times biography in the grand tradition. Very much in the same tradition would be Peterson’s own one-volume (but over a thousand pages) study, Thomas Je√erson and the New Nation: A Biography.≥ But 1960, with Malone’s ongoing biographical project looming definitively over the field of Je√erson studies—or so it seemed—was the last period of calm before the storm. Over the next four decades, Je√erson would take a historiographical beating, with many claiming that he should be toppled from the American pantheon and wishing, if it were possible, for him to be cleaved from Mount Rushmore. No longer was Je√erson almost automatically praised. In such criticism, Leonard Levy describes Je√erson as an enemy of civil liberties, Fawn Brodie renews the charges that he had a longtime sexual a√air with a slave woman he owned, Michael Zuckerman emphasizes his ‘‘negrophobia,’’ Michael Lind labels him a Southern reactionary and racist morally equivalent to Theodore Bilbo, Pauline Maier strips him of sole authorship of the Declaration of Independence , Joseph J. Ellis diminishes him systematically, Roger G. Kennedy essentially blames Je√erson for the Civil War, Paul Finkelman relentlessly focuses on the discrepancies between Je√erson’s noblesounding words and both his ownership of slaves and his refusal to forthrightly attack or work to end the institution, and Conor Cruise O’Brien—in the most intemperate attack of all—conjectures that ‘‘the twentieth century statesman whom the Thomas Je√erson of January 1793 would have most admired is Pol Pot.’’ O’Brien even Introduction 3 imagines Je√erson approving of the bombing of the federal o≈ce building in Oklahoma City.∂ Yet despite all this, as John Adams legendarily said on his deathbed, ‘‘Thomas Je√erson still survives.’’∑ Much of the new scholarship has been insightful, thorough, and salutary, though some of the attacks are ahistorical, uncontextualized , and exaggerated. Our understanding of Je√erson and his time is little enhanced by renewed attention to the facts that, over his long life, his views changed; that holding o≈ce required deviation from purely theoretical formulations; and that, in the exigency of opportunity , a higher principle might take precedence over a lesser—in the case, for example, of the Louisiana Purchase, in...