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

Who was Thomas Jefferson? Most Americans and many people around the world are familiar with the architect of the Declaration of Independence. For some, he was the intellectual savant who gave words to the ideals percolating in a revolutionary age; for others, he was a cruel enslaver, a man who owned over 600 people during his lifetime, including at least six children he fathered with Sally Hemings. To say that Jefferson was the embodiment of the "American paradox" would be an understatement, but like any figure of the Founding Era, Jefferson has had his supporters and detractors. This is not a new phenomenon—in fact, this volume demonstrates that Jefferson's legacy has long been used to support all kinds of causes, and sometimes even on both sides of an argument, issue, or grievance. Jefferson has been elevated by parties and brandished as a weapon in the political arena; he has served as the spokesman for slavery and white supremacy; he was considered a firebrand and an agitator, yet also a unifier; America's champion of democracy, who was also a member of the landed gentry. So, who was Thomas Jefferson? This remarkable collection of essays offers a new way of understanding how scholars have historically answered that question through the medium of biography, efforts that ultimately shaped Jefferson's legacy for future generations.

While historians (myself included) like to tout our abilities to research, weigh evidence, and maintain complete and total objectivity of the subject in question, this last part is simply not true. All historians, in one way or another, are shaped by past experiences or unfolding events as they study and write about the past. Sometimes, it is the circumstances of the moment in which we find ourselves; other times, it's the people with whom we surround ourselves who influence our worldview, methodology, or interpretation; and more often than not, it's our own desire to make a historical figure more relevant to the times at hand. J. Jefferson Looney, Christine Coalwell McDonald and Robert M. S. McDonald, Andrew Burstein, Jan Ellen Lewis, and Richard Samuelson explore the early efforts to craft a Jeffersonian narrative during the nineteenth century, one that Jefferson himself first shaped by preserving and curating his correspondence. Biographers such as George Tucker (who knew Jefferson), Henry S. Randall (who relied on Jefferson's family for information), and Sarah N. Randolph (who had access to her great-grandfather's correspondence) all downplayed Jefferson's life as an enslaver while casting him as a national hero worthy of adulation. Henry Adams's History of the United States offered a different perspective, as Adams drew upon his family's recollections of Jefferson. As Samuelson observes, "That story vindicated Adams's own flesh and blood, at least in certain respects. In other ways, however, Jefferson came out on top. Jefferson had more power; John Adams more truth" (108).

The inclusion of two essays that dissect biographies of Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton offers a fascinating contrast to the rest of the volume. Nancy Isenberg argues that biographers of Burr have often attempted to redeem him by villainizing Jefferson and blaming Burr's misdeeds on the constitutional failures of the election of 1800. Joanne Freeman's essay offers a whirlwind tour of American history through Jefferson and Hamilton's contentious relationship; they still cannot seem to escape their rivalry more than two hundred years later. As Freeman notes, "Both men were so enmeshed in the American experiment, so personally invested in its outcome, so passionately devoted to their worldviews … and so fundamentally opposed to each other in so many ways, that explaining the logic behind one man's life and career make it difficult not to denigrate the other" (166). The temptation to see these men only as adversaries obfuscates areas of agreement between the two and fails...