Most Americans have thought about Thomas Jefferson much as our first professional biographer, James Parton, did. “If Jefferson was wrong,” wrote Parton in 1874, “America is wrong. If America is right, Jefferson was right.” Unfortunately, Jefferson at present looks to be more wrong than right, at least among most academic historians, and therefore America has become more wrong than right, especially on matters of race. As John B. Boles points out in this good, solid, generally fair-minded biography, Jefferson was “once lauded as the champion of the little man,” but “today he is vilified as a hypocritical slave owner professing a love of liberty while quietly driving his own slaves to labor harder in his pursuit of personal luxury.”
“Surely,” writes Boles, who is professor of history at Rice and the longtime former editor of the Journal of Southern History, “an interpretative middle ground is possible, if not necessary.” Boles has attempted to find that middle ground by writing a biography that “is admittedly sympathetic but critical when appropriate.” He aims to set Jefferson “within the rich context of his time and place.” Our third president “was not a modern man,” and we cannot make him one of us. He is a tragic figure who hated the institution of slavery but found himself caught up in circumstances he could not control or overcome.
Boles realizes that the “issues of race and slavery are so important to us today that they almost overwhelm our view of Jefferson.” Although he says that he wants to deal frankly with Jefferson’s views of race and slavery, and he has a very full and honest chapter on these subjects late in the book, sometimes he allows his sympathy to get the better of him. To write that “for Jefferson, owning slaves was a means to an end—improving and sustaining Monticello—and never an end in itself” doesn’t seem to be much of a defense of Jefferson’s presumably benevolent slaveholding. Yet Boles is right in contending that we impoverish our understanding of Jefferson if we do not recognize as well his great contributions to political liberty and religious freedom.
As a prominent member of the Virginia slaveholding planter elite, Jefferson was an unlikely spokesman for equality and liberty. Although his father, Peter Jefferson, was only a substantial planter, his mother was a Randolph, perhaps the most prestigious family in all of Virginia. Jefferson, who was born in 1743, was only 14 when his father died, and he was thus raised by the Randolphs, something that Boles does not make much of.
Indeed, Boles spends very little time exploring Jefferson’s personality or explaining why Jefferson did certain peculiar things—for example, decide to build his home, Monticello, on a remote mountaintop where water and building materials were hard to come by. Instead, his biography concentrates on the exterior events of Jefferson’s private and public lives and weaves them together in a straightforward, clearly written narrative. It is the fullest and most complete single-volume life of Jefferson since Merrill Peterson’s thousand-page biography of 1970. Boles differs from Peterson largely in accepting Sally Hemings as Jefferson’s concubine who bore at least five and perhaps six of his mixed-race children—children whom he virtually ignored. Boles goes on to suggest that the relationship was “consensual, founded on shared tenderness and love,” even though Jefferson, unlike many other masters with slave concubines, never acknowledged the relationship and indirectly denied it.
It is obvious that Jefferson was one of the wealthiest slaveholding planters in Virginia, especially after his father-in-law in 1773 left him 11,000 acres of land and 135 slaves. Yet this rich aristocrat became a devout radical, dedicated, as he later put it, to the eradication of “every fibre .  .  . of ancient or future aristocracy” in the state of Virginia. In 1776, in the Virginia legislature, he set about abolishing the legal devices of primogeniture and entail that he believed supported this aristocracy. He worked to end the Anglican religious establishment in the state and to create real religious liberty—an unprecedented separation of church and state whose radicalism still takes the breath away. He planned a modern three-tiered, publicly supported educational system. He set out to reform the state’s legal system and to extend the suffrage to all white property owners, offering 50 acres of land to anyone who did not have that many. And finally, he proposed the abolition of slavery in a society 40 percent of which was enslaved. He made all these radical proposals, most of which were rejected by his aristocrat colleagues, without alienating them in any meaningful way.
Despite his desire to get rid of every fiber of aristocracy, his fellow aristocrats admired him, respected him, and elected him to every major position they could: to the legislature, to the governorship, and to the Continental Congress. Jefferson was unique not just among his Virginia colleagues but among all the major American leaders. “No other Founder,” says Boles, “was so ideologically supportive of a democratic society.” Although Jefferson’s “ideas were way ahead of his time,” his fellow slaveholding aristocrats did not hold his ultra-progressivism against him; indeed, most revered him. Boles is aware of the problem and suggests an explanation. He notes that Jefferson was always polite, “almost to a fault,” and “never had the unrelenting demeanor of a radical.” Perhaps more important was his colleagues’ realization that they had in their midst a genius who knew more about more things than anyone else in North America, Benjamin Franklin included.
Since Jefferson had written the most radical pamphlet, A Summary View of the Rights of British America (1774), that existed prior to Thomas Paine’s Common Sense (1776), it was not surprising that he was assigned the drafting of the Declaration of Independence. When he wrote “all men are created equal,” Boles, following the line of most historians, says that “he was referring to the equal possession of inherent rights, not equality of any other kind.” Actually, Jefferson and most of his colleagues seemed to have taken the idea of equality at birth more literally than that. In good enlightened manner, following the philosophical principles of John Locke, they assumed that everyone—or at least every white man: Jefferson and many other Southerners thought blacks were a different order of being—was born with the same blank slate, and that the obvious differences among people that developed during the course of their lives came from the circumstances of the environment operating on their initial blank slates.
The slaveholding planter William Byrd, who was as much of an aristocrat as Virginia was ever to know, had read widely and was a learned member of the Royal Society. Despite his great distance from the common man, however, he wanted to be thought modern and enlightened and thus could not help affirming, in 1728, that “the principal difference between one people and another proceeds only from the differing opportunities of improvement.” In other words, what counted was nurture, not nature. This is the reason Jefferson and most of the revolutionaries placed so much importance on education, as we still do today. The possibility of improvement is the basis of America’s democratic faith.
Jefferson eventually did get heavily criticized by many of his contemporaries, not for his views on race or slavery but for his religious views. In his Notes on the State of Virginia, the only book he ever wrote, he said that it did him no injury if his neighbor believed in 20 gods or no god; it neither picked his pocket nor broke his leg. And then, in the preamble to his famous Bill for Religious Freedom that was enacted in Virginia in 1786, he declared that “our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions, any more than our opinions in physics or geometry.” Not only did most of his countrymen passionately disagree with that position, they also believed that religion was not just a mere matter of opinion but a matter of faith. Jefferson soon learned to confine expressions of his radical religious views to the private dining rooms of like-minded friends. To salvage his reputation he later cut up and reassembled the New Testament, omitting all mention of miracles and emphasizing Jesus’s statements about loving one’s neighbor. This enabled him to call himself a real Christian.
He was likewise criticized for his support of the French Revolution, support that was extraordinarily intense and untiring. Even reports in 1793 from his protégé William Short in Paris about how many of his former aristocratic French friends were being guillotined did not lessen his ideological fervor. He told Short that he would rather see half the earth desolated than have the French Revolution fail: “Were there but an Adam and Eve left in every country, and left free, it would be better than as it is now.” Boles dismisses this infamous letter as an example of Jefferson’s writing “hyperbolically” to intimate friends, a kind of symbolic language not to be taken literally. Yet Jefferson sincerely believed that the success of the American Revolution was tied to the success of the French revolution, and his and his followers’ passionate commitment to that Revolution eventually brought the nation to the brink of war.
Jefferson and his followers, who formed an opposition Republican party in the 1790s, became fearful that the Federalists, as the governing party led by Alexander Hamilton called themselves, were trying to create a strong fiscal-military state in emulation of Great Britain. It was not a false fear, as many Federalists, including Vice President and later President John Adams, were indeed talking of moving the United States in a monarchical direction. By 1798, the Federalists had developed their own fears, fears that France was threatening to invade the United States and, with the aid of fifth columnists (Jefferson and his Republican party), turn the country into a puppet republic just like those that Napoleon’s army was creating all over Europe.
The threat of a French invasion seemed real, and the Federalists, like Americans in 1942 fearful of a Japanese invasion, overreacted—in the Federalists’ case, passing the Alien and Sedition Acts. Admiral Nelson’s destruction of the French fleet at the Battle of the Nile in 1798 ended the invasion scare and, with the Federalists thoroughly discredited, Jefferson rode to victory as president in the election of 1800.
Jefferson saw his election as a new beginning. The spirit of 1776, he said, had finally been fulfilled and the United States could at last shine as “the world’s best hope” for the spread of liberty and republicanism. With Napoleon’s assuming the office of consul for life, and the apparent stifling of the French Revolution, America’s role as the sole emblematic republic became all the more important. It was Jefferson, more than any other single figure, who created the idea of American exceptionalism.
Jefferson set about reversing a decade of Federalist policies that had expanded the size of the national government way beyond anything he and the Republicans thought proper. He eliminated all internal taxes, cut the bureaucracy (which was minuscule by modern standards), and severely reduced the Army and Navy. The only thing he couldn’t touch was Hamilton’s Bank of the United States, protected as it was by its charter; but the Republicans allowed that charter to lapse in 1811. Much to Jefferson’s chagrin, the courts remained in the hands of the Federalists. No one hated more the efforts of the federal courts to expand the authority of the national government through judicial activism. More thoroughly than any subsequent president, Jefferson preached the doctrine of strict construction of the Constitution, although as president he sometimes did not practice it.
Although Boles doesn’t make very much of it, Jefferson’s vision of his “empire of liberty” was very expansive. Not only did he want the Floridas, New Orleans, and all of the territory west of the Mississippi for the United States, but he also had his eye on Canada, Mexico’s provinces, and even the island of Cuba. His purchase of Louisiana from France in 1803 fulfilled his greatest dream. Now America could provide land for successive generations of yeoman farmers who, he believed, were the only incorruptible basis for republican government. Like other enlightened liberals, he thought war bred monarchy and big government. Consequently he sought alternatives to the use of military force, experimenting with the withholding of American commerce, what we today call economic sanctions, that climaxed with his controversial Embargo Act of 1807.
Boles doesn’t capture much of the despair and anxiety Jefferson felt during the last years of his retirement. Jefferson turned inward and became much more parochial and sectional-minded than he ever had been before. The Missouri crisis of 1819 over the right of Congress to prohibit slavery in the West unnerved him. He wondered what “the Holy alliance, in and out of Congress,” aimed to do “with us” Southern slaveholders. He railed against the aggrandizing force of the federal government and what it meant for the South. He became a more strident defender of states’ rights than he had been in 1798 when he penned the Kentucky resolution justifying the right of a state to nullify federal law. He feared a breakup of the United States but declared that “submission to a government of unlimited powers” was much worse than a dissolution of the union.
Boles says that Jefferson’s near-fanatical assertions of states’ rights had nothing to do with his “defending the institution of slavery.” But this is hardly convincing. Jefferson made it clear that the Missouri crisis and Northern aggression threatened those “states afflicted with this unfortunate population” of slaves. Were “our slaves to be presented with freedom and a dagger?” he asked John Adams in 1821. “For if Congress has a power to regulate the conditions of the inhabitants of the states, within the states, it will be but another exercise of that power to declare that all shall be free.” Jefferson became as much of a fire-eating supporter of the most dogmatic, impassioned, and sectional-minded elements in Virginia as the arch states-rightists Spencer Roane and John Randolph.
During the last year of his life, when he felt “a kind of uneasiness I had never before experienced,” he was pathetically reduced to listing his contributions during 61 years of public service in order to justify a legislative favor. His fellow Virginians didn’t seem to appreciate all he had done: “All, all dead!” he told a Northern friend, “and ourselves left alone midst a new generation whom we know not, and who know not us.”
Abraham Lincoln, more than anyone, rescued Thomas Jefferson from his identification with Southern sectionalism and turned him into a national icon. “All honor to Jefferson,” declared Lincoln on the eve of the Civil War. By setting forth the explosive idea that “all men are created equal,” Jefferson, said Lincoln, had created “a rebuke and a stumbling block” to the emergence of future tyranny and oppression. “The principles of Jefferson,” said Lincoln, “are the definitions and axioms of free society.” That’s the Jefferson, the architect of liberty, that we rightly celebrate.
Gordon S. Wood is professor of history emeritus at Brown. His latest book, Friends Divided: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, will appear later this year.
