Thomas Jefferson (review)

Thomas Jefferson's life has inspired the curiosity of legions of individuals both during and after his lifetime. His own contemporaries regularly employed his celebrity to strengthen their own public prestige or undermine the credibility of their political opponents. Over the past century and a half, historians have likewise repeatedly reinterpreted his life and legacy, and in the process his reputation has risen and fallen. Most recently, scholars have focused their attention on Jefferson's contradictions, a development that has led authors either to celebrate him "for his aspirations or damn . . . him for his failures" (xiii). No one in the past or present, it seems, can resist casting a moral judgment on a man who "could not resolve the conflicts his soaring words helped to define" (190).

R. B. Bernstein, one of Jefferson's most recent biographers, seems to be the exception to the rule. While he agrees that Jefferson should be understood primarily as a man of ideas whose actions often conflicted with his principles, Bernstein seeks to emphasize the context that shaped the choices he made and leaves the judging to the reader. Bernstein reminds his audience that as Jefferson gave voice to the nation's "core principles" he did so within "an atmosphere of constant crisis" (xvii). More than any other group of leaders in America, "Jefferson and the other members of the Revolutionary generation . . . were forced by their circumstances to learn on the run" (xviii). It should hardly be surprising then, that the nation's early leaders behaved in occasionally contradictory ways. Examining Jefferson to explore what he should have or should not have done, implies Bernstein, ignores the more important lessons of his life and legacy, for no other early American leader displayed such "creative statesmanship" (36). In the end, then, Bernstein has accomplished something that has eluded nearly every previous biographer, a refreshingly "balanced understanding" of the Virginian, one that unapologetically includes his successes and failures, consistencies and contradictions (xiii).

In his chapter on late eighteenth-century Virginia, for example, Bernstein argues that it was during this period that Jefferson "learned the difficult lessons about the conflict between framing idealistic measures and carrying them into effect" (36). In the fall of 1776, Jefferson returned to Virginia and focused his attention on transforming his native state into an ideal republican society. In many ways, Bernstein notes, Jefferson was remarkably successful. He introduced, and the state legislature eventually passed, legislation designed to eliminate entail and primogeniture. From Jefferson's perspective, these property laws "bore the stamp of monarchy and landed privilege" and were inconsistent with the new nation's revolutionary ideals (37). He also encouraged the Virginia General Assembly to pass legislation guaranteeing religious freedom. By doing so he intended to codify the separation of church and state and diminish the power of an Old World authority. Through these legal reforms, Jefferson attempted to replace a traditional hierarchical colonial society with an open, tolerant, egalitarian modern social order.

Although he energetically and creatively sought to eliminate the nonrepublican characteristics of Virginia's colonial society through legal reform, Jefferson chose not to extend his revolutionary zeal to the institution that contradicted his ideals most visibly, slavery. Rather than introduce legislation abolishing the institution, Jefferson avoided the issue, insisting that without an accompanying colonization program, any emancipation scheme would result in "a horrific race war" (40). Bernstein concludes that "[l]ike many other slaveholders, Jefferson could not or would not grow beyond his origins as a member of the planter aristocracy . . . [and] confront the agonizing contradiction between slavery's realities and the Revolution's ideals" (41).

Certainly, Bernstein's narrative in this chapter offers little that is unfamiliar. His ability to avoid telling his reader whether or not Jefferson should be judged good or bad because of his failure to pursue emancipation, however, distinguishes his work. More importantly, his perspective offers a model of historical inquiry for students to emulate. Additionally, by laying the sequence of events and the context that shaped them before the reader, Bernstein has provided teachers...