Jefferson and the Virginians: Democracy, Constitutions, and Empire by Peter S. Onuf (review)

Professor Onuf is the latest holder of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation Chair at the University of Virginia. Onuf's career as a scholar and educator has contributed significantly to the legacy of that posting, and he merits inclusion among the pantheon of greats, including Dumas Malone and Merrill Peterson, who have held it previously. Those of us who have learned so much from Professor Onuf, and the many of his students who have gone on to become notable scholars themselves, cannot help but feel a sadness in learning that he has apparently published his last book. If this is, in fact, the last book Onuf writes, it is worthy of the man.

The book is drawn from a series of three lectures forming the Walter Lynwood Fleming Lectures in Southern History. The lectures, each of which forms a distinct chapter in the book, develop an understanding of democracy through Thomas Jefferson's interactions with other Virginians, Patrick Henry, James Madison, and George Washington, during the founding era. Each of these Virginians contributed to the worldview of the author of the Declaration of Independence and the nation's third president. Madison and Jefferson shared very similar ideological perspectives and became close friends, whereas Jefferson had little regard for Henry and, while greatly respecting Washington, was frequently at odds with him. Onuf focuses not on the personal relationships, however, but on the thoughts of these men and how the words they spoke and wrote contributed not only to a broadening of one another's political philosophy but also to the American people's understanding of their Constitution and government.

Perhaps the greatest contribution made by this book is its description of the fluidity of democratic ideas, too frequently conceived of and taught as permanent inviolable precepts underlying democracy, and the various words used to describe or explain them. One of the crucial debates of the founding era concerned relative degrees of authority or autonomy among the people, local and state governments, and the national government. Another concerned the degree to which the American people needed religious inspiration in order to develop the virtue necessary for the self-sacrifice required for self-government. On both of these issues, Onuf demonstrates how "discussions" between the subject Virginians, oftentimes relying upon terms such as empire, sovereignty, equality, and patriotism that had multiple meanings and connotations to their various users, forcing reconsiderations, compromises, and even capitulations in order to form and preserve the union.

Yet, one cannot read this book and believe that Onuf is only, or perhaps even primarily, concerned with the intellectual interplay of four of this nation's most prominent founders. The literature on Thomas Jefferson has changed dramatically over the last fifty to sixty years, and it reflects the changing values and perspectives of the American people. Once the champion of our national government and the populist founder of the Democratic Party, moved by a concern for the common man, an antipathy to slavery, and a class consciousness that he shared with early twentieth-century social reformers, Jefferson has lately become an atheistic libertarian devoted to capitalism and states' rights who harbored racist views and may have sexually forced himself upon his mixed-race slave. Onuf notes on the very first page of his text that he "remain[s] deeply conflicted" about Jefferson (ix). Yet he clearly wants to put the record straight on a number of these issues. Jefferson was a deist, not an atheist; he accepted human rights as natural and conceived of government as a means of protecting them, but he was not a libertarian. He felt that local and state governments, as closer to the people, were the most democratic, but he recognized the imperative of a national government and worked to establish, preserve, and empower it. He embraced free markets and capitalism as securing opportunities for people to seek...