Thomas Jefferson's Lives: Biographers and the Battle for History ed. by Robert M. S. McDonald (review)

Thomas Jefferson s Lives is the best single volume available today for historians to get a handle on how Jefferson studies has evolved. Starting with Jefferson himself, the volume moves forward in time, offering astute, original analyses of Jefferson's major biographers.

In her introduction to the volume, Barbara Oberg, the past General Editor of the Papers of Thomas Jefferson, acknowledges that Jefferson scholarship cannot evade Americans' expectations of the man: "Each age creates its own Thomas Jefferson and adopts its own mythology about the 'founding of the nation'" (3). Oberg's introduction outlines how changing historical contexts inspired biographers from Jefferson's time to ours to rethink his place in the American pantheon.

The volume's spirit is generous yet critical. The book's first section, "Memory," focuses on Jefferson's nineteenth-century biographers. J. Jefferson Looney opens the volume with an examination of how Jefferson curated his papers to shape his legacy. In the second section, "Rivalry," we learn from Nancy Isenberg and Joanne Freeman how biographers of Jefferson's rivals Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton used Jefferson as their foil, much in the way that both are used by Jefferson's biographers. The final section, "History," traces the development of an academic understanding of Jefferson's life, including insightful chapters about Dumas Malone and Merrill Peterson, Jefferson's two most prominent twentieth-century biographers.¹

One of the valuable tensions in this volume is how to approach Jefferson. It is hard not to read this volume without admiring past biographers' close readings of Jefferson's words. In turn, the volume's contributors demonstrate the rewards of reading Jefferson's biographers closely. Yet textuality is always in tension with Jefferson as spirit, a person who, in Brian Steele's words, "transcends time and place" (193).

A related tension is between Jefferson's image and the historical Jefferson. Peterson began his career with a dissertation written under Perry Miller, published as The Jeffersonian Image in the American Mind (New York, 1960), before undertaking his biography. Because Peterson denied Jefferson's relationship with his enslaved mistress Sally Hemings, Francis Cogliano argues, Peterson's own image has suffered. As a result, we overlook Peterson's critique of Jefferson's racism. An advocate of equality, Peterson offered a Jefferson that could speak for the civil-rights era.

Another tension is balancing Jefferson's public and private life. Since James Callender's first published accusations about Jefferson and Hemings in the Richmond Recorder in 1802, Jefferson'sdefenders have sought to downplay them. One approach was to ignore Jefferson's private life, but Jefferson's descendants sought to counter what they considered stains on his character by portraying a loving father and grandfather. Yet all families are complicated, Jan Lewis reminds us, in her discussion of Jefferson's great-granddaughter Sarah N. Randolph's romanticized biography.² Reading Jefferson's family's words seriously, Lewis finds a father who was tough and demanding, and whose daughters craved attention and praise.

We often imagine Jefferson's domestic life from his retirement at Monticello as one in which he doted on his grandchildren, as Annette Gordon-Reed reminds us in her chapter about Fawn Brodie. Yet Jefferson the grandfather ignores Jefferson the father of a black and white family. That's what made Brodie's 1974 biography of Jefferson so important.³ Brodie ensured that Jefferson's private life was not the property of his white heirs. Brodie, Gordon-Reed writes, was the first to take seriously evidence from Jefferson's black descendants. Gordon-Reed laments that Brodie, dismissed by Malone and Peterson, did not live to see herconclu-sions vindicated.

The volume concludes with Gordon Wood'sappraisal of Peter Onuf's work. Having recently retired as the third Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation Professor at the University of Virginia (Malone and Peterson preceded him), Onuf, Wood writes, did not...