Review by New York Times Review
the doors to Thomas Jefferson's private chamber at Monticello opened out onto the main entrance hall. But a visitor in 1809, the year he returned to his mountain-top Virginia refuge for good after the presidency, noticed that the doors to his inner sanctum were always locked. No one who did not have a key could get in, and he seemed sparing in handing them out. Visitors of the time were not the only ones eager to unlock the secrets of America's third president and author of the Declaration of Independence. For more than 200 years, Jefferson has been, along with Abraham Lincoln, perhaps our most analyzed president, the subject of endless study, scrutiny and speculation. While today we debate the size of our would-be presidents' hands, with Jefferson we debate the breadth of his intellect and the depth of his contradictions. Few have spent more time trying to pry into Jefferson's historical hideaway than Annette Gordon-Reed and Peter S. Onuf, who have collaborated to produce "'Most Blessed of the Patriarchs': Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of the Imagination." To the already bursting Jefferson canon, they add a fresh and layered analysis, one centered more on his interior life than his deeds for posterity. The book takes its title from a letter Jefferson sent a friend in 1793 as he prepared to return to Monticello after a stint as secretary of state. He was looking forward to the refuge of the home he built, where he was master of his own life, not to mention those of many others. Much of this book is set not in New York or Washington or Philadelphia, the places from which Jefferson entered the American pantheon, but in Monticello, the place that most reflected him. It is "Monticello's ambiguous moral geography" - and Jefferson's own - that the authors set out to explore in a sort of scholarly Lewis and Clark journey through the mind and philosophy of the most enigmatic of the founders. How to resolve, after all, Jefferson's role establishing the self-evident truth that all men are created equal and his status as a slaveholder who fathered children by a teenager he held in servitude? How to ponder his deep love of family, defined in the broadest terms, and his separate and distinctly unequal clans? How to reconcile his lifelong ambition to be a "seeker of truth," as Gordon-Reed and Onuf call him, with his manifest deceptions, self- and otherwise? "We are often asked, ?What is left to be known and said about Thomas Jefferson?'" the authors write in their preface. "The answer, we think, is 'Everything.'" Gordon-Reed and Onuf steer clear of the false choice between reverence and reproach, instead embracing the incongruities and plumbing them one by one - Jefferson's vision of himself, the American experiment, religion and of course, race. His "aspirations were inextricably linked to his limitations," they say. Gordon-Reed, the Charles Warren professor of American legal history at Harvard Law School, comes at their task after years of inspecting Jefferson's closets. She became fascinated with Jefferson and his slaves while growing up as an African-American girl in East Texas. She went on to publish "Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy" in 1997, taking on the skeptics who had doubted a sexual relationship between the two, a book that looked all the more impressive after DNA testing later all but confirmed the case. Her follow-up masterpiece, "The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family," won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. One of those who encouraged the publication of her first Jefferson book was Onuf, then chairman of the history department at the University of Virginia, still known today as "Mr. Jefferson's university" for its founder. An accomplished scholar himself, Onuf has written or edited a halfdozen books on Jefferson and remains the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation professor emeritus at the university. AT THE HEART of their study of Jefferson's life are the questions of freedom and slavery. Jefferson's earliest memory was being handed up to a slave on a pillow, and the last person who understood his words on his death bed was a slave who at his request adjusted his pillow before he slipped away. "Slavery," Gordon-Reed and Onuf thus note, "bounded his life from cradle to grave." For all his travels, "he remained very much a product of Virginia's plantation society - the society that formed him and the place where he discovered what role he wanted to play in the world." Jefferson condemned slavery and understood its evil, yet profited from it. He considered himself a benevolent master, responsible for the well-being of the humans he held in bondage, but he did not release his slaves upon his death, as did his fellow Virginian George Washington, who stipulated that they would be freed upon his widow's passing. Sally Hemings, the half sister of Jefferson's deceased wife, born of a liaison between master and slave, became his "substitute for a wife," as one contemporary called her, and she and her children enjoyed better conditions than other slaves. But Jefferson was a product of his times, and his black progeny were never equated to his white daughters, although they, unlike his other slaves, were liberated in his will. Gordon-Reed and Onuf attach great importance to Monticello as the key to understanding Jefferson's contradictions and his own empire of the imagination. With the help of slaves, he built his residence atop a mountain, a location that made little sense for plantation life and yet afforded the escape he craved to write and think, and even to pretend he was not the partisan politician that of course he was. Jefferson bristled at the pomp and circumstance of the French court where he served as American minister and thought himself a humbler man. "I am savage enough to prefer the woods, the wilds and the independence of Monticello to all the brilliant pleasures of this gay capital," he said. "I shall therefore rejoin myself to my native country with new attachments, with exaggerated esteem for its advantages, for though there is less wealth there, there is more freedom, more ease and less misery." He designed Monticello without a grand staircase, meaning that the owner did not descend to his visitors, as in other mansions of the period. Although it had 33 rooms, "it did not give the impression of a big house where the master reaffirmed his exalted position," the authors note. But master he was. Indeed, while the doors to his private chamber were locked, there were other ways to get in and out so that he could stroll onto the south terrace or into the greenhouse. Gordon-Reed and Onuf are not the first to search for other ways into Jefferson's private place, nor will they be the last. But they have provided a smart and useful map for those who are certain to follow. PETER BAKER, a longtime White House correspondent for The Times and The Washington Post, is the author of "Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [June 3, 2016]
Review by Booklist Review
Extracted from a Jefferson letter, the title alludes to his role as a plantation slave owner, despite his expressed progressive views, opposition to slavery among them. Declining to arraign Jefferson on hypocrisy charges, Gordon-Reed and Onuf, both highly reputable Jefferson scholars, strive to understand Jefferson's outlooks over his long life. This is not, therefore, a biography per se, but rather a pursuit of Jefferson's thought on various topics, the most important of which, in the authors' treatment, is Jefferson's conception of the family. In tune with his times, he idealized it as a well-ordered, male-led hierarchy, and further, as the inculcating foundation of citizens for republican self-government. A problematic subject, of course, is Jefferson's fatherhood of a slave family at Monticello, as Gordon-Reed argued in her influential Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings (1997), and which she reprises in this work. The authors also posit that Jefferson's residence in France profoundly influenced him on family structure and other matters such as music and architecture. Gordon-Reed and Onuf's keen and fresh approach to Jefferson and his ideas will engage history buffs.--Taylor, Gilbert Copyright 2016 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Gordon-Reed, who won the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award for The Hemingses of Monticello, and Onuf (The Mind of Thomas Jefferson), professor emeritus of history at the University of Virginia, probe the paradoxical figure of the third president, unpacking what Jefferson himself "thought he was doing in the world." They neither indict nor absolve Jefferson; instead, they aim to make sense of his contradictions for modern sensibilities by mining familiar texts, as well as his actions as a Virginia plantation owner and American ambassador to France. Although considered progressive for his time, Jefferson was fully cognizant of the hypocrisy of owning slaves while fighting for liberation from Great Britain. Jefferson's immersion in revolutionary France tempered his attitudes toward slavery, but did not persuade him to abandon it. He made his peace with this moral dilemma by striving to be the "kindest of masters." The authors reveal what plantation family life meant to Jefferson and explain how his notoriously poor plantation management shaped the lives of Monticello's enslaved people. They also offer fresh insights into his attitudes about privacy and religion, and his relationships with his wife, Martha, and his slave Sally Hemings. In seeking to reconcile the various strands of Jeffersonian thought and action, Gordon-Reed and Onuf have produced a fascinating addition to the Jefferson canon. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Gordon-Reed (law, Harvard Law Sch.; The Hemingses of Monticello) and Onuf (history, Univ. of Virginia; The Mind of Thomas Jefferson) bring their qualified expertise to present an intimate portrait of Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), the third U.S. president. This work begins with an interesting discussion drawn from a letter composed by Jefferson's granddaughter regarding the early yet glaring differences between North and South. The authors set the issue of slavery, and Jefferson's direct connection to it, as a central theme, allowing readers to follow Jefferson through the stages of his life, all the while observing the changes in his thinking and the complicated relationships on his estate. Jefferson the paradox shines through on these pages: the plantation master who knew slavery was wrong, the revolutionary who avoided conflict, and the patriarch who advanced republicanism. Jefferson's relationship with Sally Hemings and their children are thoroughly examined. This work emphasizes ideas and connections, as opposed to dates, policy details, and data. Primary source citations include many letters and Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia. VERDICT Readers of American history and politics will enjoy this enlightening look at a fascinating man. [See Prepub Alert, 10/19/15.]-Jeffrey Meyer, Mt. Pleasant P.L., IA © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A portrait of Thomas Jefferson's passionate belief in Enlightenment values and how it determined his personal character and that of the young nation. Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner Gordon-Reed (American Legal History/Harvard Law School; The Hemingses of Monticello, 2009, etc.) and Onuf (Emeritus, History/Univ. of Virginia; The Mind of Thomas Jefferson, 2007, etc.) are fascinated by the many shifting "selves" of Jefferson: father, husband, slave owner, diplomat, politician, and cosmopolitan. His broad sense of himself as "the most blessed of patriarchs" is both a beautiful notion and mostly correct as well as a patronizing illusion considering that he was the master of numerous slaves at his Monticello plantation and, literally, their father. In this meticulously documented work exploring Jefferson's many roles in life, the authors take the great man at his word rather than how they think he ought to be: "We instead seek to understand what Thomas Jefferson thought he was doing in the world." Subsequently, the work proves to be a subtle, intriguing study of his Enlightenment ideals, beginning with his great hope in his fellow white Virginians as the ideal republicans who (with his help) abolished primogeniture, possessed a "fruitful attachment to land," and "knitted togethertender attachments," such as strategic arranged marriages among the upper class. However, his vision was problematic since he and his observant granddaughter Ellen, who lived for a spell in the North, documented well the differences between the slothful Southern temperament and the Northern industrious one, while the ills of slavery, which Jefferson himself wrote about in Notes on the State of Virginia, would not go awayand indeed, his own ties to the Hemingses could not be hidden. The authors make some trenchant observations regarding the effects of living in France on Jefferson's tempering of the republican ideals, in showing him both the dangers of extremism and the hope of "ameliorating" his slaves' conditions by incorporating them into his patriarchal family. An elegant, astute study that is both readable and thematically rich. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
