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Afterword: Light, Liberty, and Slavery
- University of Virginia Press
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Afterword Light, Liberty, and Slavery joyce appleby Reading this cluster of fine essays made me aware that a new generation of Je√erson scholars has arrived. It has fascinated me to see how they are taking possession of this most interesting forebear of ours. People are always saying something is a great pleasure, but I want to begin by stressing that it really is a great pleasure to learn that there is a fresh group of historians studying Je√erson and bringing to bear on his career questions that their generation—and their generation alone—can ask. I was amused years ago when I read a quip from Millicent Sowerby, one of Je√erson’s great bibliographers. Noting the practical indebtedness of scholars to Je√erson, she wrote that ‘‘one of the really outstanding achievements & contributions to humanity, is the number of people, including of course myself, whom Je√erson has helped to support since his death.’’∞ Evidently he is still doing it. When people ask why we need a new history of Je√erson or the Monroe Doctrine or the Depression, I explain that history is not just about the past— it is a conversation between the past and present because the people in the present bring a fresh set of questions to the past. All historical scholarship begins with people’s questions. And those questions are generated out of their experiences, unique to their time and to the years in which they matured and the state of knowledge when they became historians. 208 Joyce Appleby Because my comments focus on this notion of a new cohort of Je√erson scholars I want to repeat the point. Vast numbers of things happen in the past—as they do in the present, which is about to become the past. We are only curious about a subset of those events and developments. Because we have been studying founding fathers for seven or eight generations, which means introducing the questions of seven or eight successive groups of scholars , we know a lot about them, but the studies will go on, marked by the curiosity of each cohort. I find in these essays two consistent features and one surprise. As befits historians doing graduate work in the past decade and a half, the authors are more interested in culture than politics, economics, or diplomacy. In truth, historians have not been interested in diplomacy for fifty years. Although this collection is subtitled ‘‘the power of knowledge,’’ the essays reveal more an interest in Je√ersonian rhetoric than in his knowledge per se. By that I mean Je√erson’s splendid use of words to convey the beauty, dignity, and hope that he invested in learning and teaching. What captures the authors’ imagination is Je√erson’s imagination—his vision for the new nation and its westward expansion, his understanding of learning, of architecture, of human nature, and his passion for books, his thoughts on the American people and democracy, upon religion and morality , and the source and importance of human talents. This is a great place to start studying Je√erson, but this weft in the nation’s cultural fabric needs the warp of politics to be complete. The second consistency I see is a reaction to the group of Je√erson scholars of the previous period—those who did their graduate work in the 1970s and 1980s. It was their lot to reconcile the nation to the founding fathers’ deep immersion in slavery and the problems created when the Mason-Dixon line went from surveyors’ boundary to one between free and slave labor in the new United States after northern laws abolished slavery. Their work signaled a critical shift in American history—one not always welcome to a public used to avoiding the subject of slaves. Je√erson, the slaveholder, appears in the shadows of these essays, even when his rhetorical flourishes inadvertently bring to the reader’s mind the incongruity between what he is saying and his status as the holder of people as slaves. I do not think Je√ersonian scholarship needs to be like a stuck needle on a record (for those who remember phonograph records) but rather that it should be noted when a [3.89.56.228] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 18:41 GMT) Afterword 209 contradiction occurs between what Je√erson says and does and his experience as the owner, at any given time, of over 200 men, women, and children. Christine and Rob McDonald...