Family, Slavery, and Love in the Early American Republic: The Essays of Jan Ellen Lewis ed. by Barry Bienstock, Annette Gordon-Reed, and Peter S. Onuf

Abstract

Reviewed by: Family, Slavery, and Love in the Early American Republic: The Essays of Jan Ellen Lewis ed. by Barry Bienstock, Annette Gordon-Reed, and Peter S. Onuf Nancy Isenberg Family, Slavery, and Love in the Early American Republic: The Essays of Jan Ellen Lewis. Edited by Barry Bienstock, Annette Gordon-Reed, and Peter S. Onuf, with contributions by Carolyn Eastman, Nicole Eustace, and David Waldstreicher. Williamsburg, Va., and Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021. Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture. 432 pages. Cloth, ebook. The late leading scholar of the early republic Jan Ellen Lewis was one of those rare historians who was not afraid to explore new areas of research. Her interests were broad, extending to women’s history, constitutional questions involving race and gender, the history of emotions, and the cultural meaning of republicanism. Though her career began in the field of Thomas Jefferson studies, she took an unorthodox stance and refused to depict him as an iconic Renaissance man in the way many historians did. Rather, she explored his emotionally wrought family relations and his traumas and dramas within the domestic sphere. Impressively, Lewis showed how Jefferson’s domestic idiom traveled outside the home, shaping the political, social, and legal thought that lay at the heart of heroic treatments of him. At the same time, although she did not paper over his complicity with slavery and his blindness and privilege as a wellborn first son at home among his peers in Virginia’s gentry class, she also avoided the reductionist pose of turning Jefferson into a modern-day villain. Anyone who reads the new collection of her essays, Family, Slavery, and Love in the Early American Republic, will discover her to have been a gifted writer and a sharp thinker on Jefferson and his times. Jefferson has long been the most provocative and problematic founder. Because he wrote with feeling and best expressed the nation’s ideals, many Americans have developed an almost personal relationship with him and feel a compelling need to know him beyond his words. Yet for many he is elusive, baffling, and self-protective. He presented his political enemies—whether British or American—as unscrupulous, vile characters, which explains why popular writers, journalists, and historians have often found themselves forced to declare their allegiance: Are you on Jefferson’s side or not? Lewis’s scholarship cut through the emotional morass that engulfs Jefferson’s legacy. In tackling Jefferson, Lewis made it clear that she never wanted to compose a biography. As literary critics have observed, biography presents the danger of assuming a coherent self and imputing logical explanations for behavior rather than accepting each individual life as a bundle of [End Page 630] contradictions.1 Lewis’s historical gift lay in ferreting out dubious rationalizations and logical inconsistencies. In one powerful essay, “The White Jeffersons” (1999), she showed that Jefferson, a loving father and grandfather, conditioned his white family so that they would still lie for him long after his death, inventing cover stories to mask the truth about his relationship with Sally Hemings. In excruciating detail in “The Blessings of Domestic Society” (1993), she reveals Jefferson’s suffocating “never-ceasing love” (310) for his white daughters. Within the family fold, happiness bore psychological costs.2 Lewis’s scholarship helped shape a version of cultural history influenced by literary and linguistic analysis, post-structuralism, feminist theory, new historicism, and anthropology. She directed this approach to examining whether the early republic, for all its revolutionary inheritance, transformed the system of patriarchy it had inherited from the British. What she found might be called “republican double-talk,” with double-talk defined as that which “appears to be earnest . . . but is in fact a mixture of sense and nonsense.”3 The ideology of the Enlightenment and republicanism made Americans at once optimistic and deeply suspicious of their fellow citizens, forcing them to contort their lofty abstract principles—and nowhere more acutely than in gender relations. If government relied on the will of the people, as most in the early republic accepted, citizens needed to be...