American Abyss

Thomas Jefferson has become both an especially alluring, and an especially daunting, subject for an academic historian. Intriguing to the public, an icon for popular fictions and films, Jefferson attracts an audience beyond the academy. Joseph J. Ellis explains, “Jefferson was electromagnetic. He symbolized the most cherished and most contested values in modern American culture” (p. xii). But he is triply daunting. First, there is the immense range of Jefferson’s roles, accomplishments, and failures. He was a Virginia planter, an autodidact architect and naturalist, a Continental congressman, the primary author of the Declaration of Independence, governor of Virginia, champion of separating church from state, ambassador to France, the first secretary of state, the third president of the United States, founder of the University of Virginia, a husband, father, and slaveholder. Second, Jefferson remains a notoriously uncooperative subject for a biographer. He was, Ellis wryly notes, “endlessly elusive and extraordinarily adroit at covering his tracks” (p. xii). Ever contradictory, Jefferson “combined great depth with great shallowness, massive learning with extraordinary naivete, piercing insights into others with daunting powers of self-deception” (p. 22). Fitting his diverse activities and complex character into a single volume is virtually impossible. And one multiple-volume biography by Dumas Malone is quite enough. Third, Jefferson is an increasingly difficult figure for contemporary scholars to like. Where past generations were eager to overlook his procrastination on slavery and his promotion of racism, we highlight them, to Jefferson’s detriment. As race and slavery have become more central to our understanding of American history, Jefferson’s “stock was fated to fall in the scholarly world” (p. 16). ¹

To avoid “a free fall into the Jeffersonian abyss” (p. xii), Joseph Ellis adopts a dual strategy. First, rather than dedicate his life to researching and writing an exhaustively detailed biography, Ellis concentrates on five “extended moments” that cover twenty-seven years in a life of eighty-three: Jefferson’s stint in the Continental Congress when he wrote the Declaration of Independence (1775–1776); his post-Revolutionary tenure as the American ambassador in Paris (1784–1789); his temporary political retirement to Monticello (1794–1797); his first term as president (1801–1804); and his final decade of growing despair (1816–1826). Ellis explains, “My goal is to catch Jefferson at propitious moments in his life, to zoom in on his thoughts and actions during those extended moments, to focus on the values and convictions that reveal themselves in these specific historical contexts, all the while providing the reader with sufficient background on what has transpired between sightings to follow the outline of Jefferson’s life from birth to death” (p. xi). Second, his narrative gropes for “an honorable course between idolatry and evisceration. . . . The best and the worst of American history are inextricably tangled together in Jefferson, and anyone who confines his search to one side of the moral equation is destined to miss a significant portion of the story” (p. xi).

By adopting an episodic structure and by seeking the moderate middle, Ellis claims success in the difficult quest for Jefferson’s elusive character. Where others have found an endless array of puzzling contradictions and distorting reflections, Ellis detects a fundamental consistency “from the time he first appeared on the national state in 1775 until his exquisitely timed death on July 4, 1826” (p. xii). He defines Jefferson as an eloquent, sentimental, and romantic radical who restlessly pursued a libertarian utopia where voluntarism unites society in the virtual absence of state power. Uncomfortable with present reality, he projected his alluring fantasies forward and backward in time (onto a golden age past and into a perfect future) or westward in space across the Mississippi.

A master of righteous indignation, Jefferson rigidly dichotomized people and causes as heroes and villains, good and evil. No pluralist, he regarded his opponents as, at best, dupes and, at worst, treasonous conspirators. He began in 1774–1776 by casting the British as latter-day Norman tyrants out to crush the American revival of...