Confounding Father: Thomas Jefferson's Image in His Own Time

Abstract

For anyone dismayed by the salacious and defamatory political battles carried on in today's press, a bit of historical perspective is necessary. Robert M. S. McDonald's carefully researched and beautifully written study of how Thomas Jefferson was viewed in his own time provides ample information that our present unpleasantness is far from new. Confounding Father presents itself as a prequel to Merrill D. Peterson's classic study The Jefferson Image in the American Mind (1960), which traced the myriad ways later generations of Americans viewed their third president. McDonald follows Peterson's lead, finding a complex portrait of “fact and myth” in the way Jefferson was portrayed during his lifetime. One difference is that, while he lived, Jefferson was no passive observer of how he was portrayed. He understood that he was a symbol of his age, reflecting Republican hopes as well as Federalist fears for the future, and he actively, if surreptitiously, sought to shape his image. As McDonald puts it, “long before the emergence of identity politics, in the era of the early republic there existed a politics of identity” (p. 6).