The Scholars' Jefferson

Abstract

N I 960, Merrill Peterson concluded in his book TheJefferson Image in the American Mind that Thomas Jefferson had finally, belatedly ascended to a crucial place in the symbolical architecture of this nation. It was now possible for scholars to take the measure of the man. scholarly wish to possess Jefferson for himself might never be realized, Peterson wrote, a Jefferson about whom politicians cease to contend, whose ideas suffer drastic erosion from all sides, and whose own history proves to be a rewarding field of study in itself-this figure invites the true scholar and begs the true historical discovery.' In the academy, Peterson wrote, the multiple Jeffersons of the party polemicists were already giving way to a new image of the culture hero-the civilized man with his multiplicity of interests and achievements.2 Peterson looked forward to the elaboration of a scholarly, nonpartisan Jefferson image. Historians no longer saw American history as a great, ongoing struggle between Jeffersonian democrats and Hamiltonian aristocrats, the people and the interests. Indeed, as Peterson showed, this genealogy of the parties had always been somewhat suspect, and the confusion became complete when Democratic New Dealers invoked Jefferson's progressive spirit to justify their neo-Hamiltonian, stateinterventionist programs. After the Roosevelt Revolution, Peterson wrote, serious men stopped yearning for the agrarian utopia, politicians (and most historians too) laid aside the Jefferson-Hamilton dialogue, and almost no one any longer maintained the fiction that American government was run, or ought to be run, on the Jeffersonian model. The disintegration of the Jeffersonian philosophy of government heralded the ultimate canonization of Jefferson.3 Peterson's Jefferson Image is superb cultural history but poor prophecy. This is not to say that historians have neglected Jefferson.4 When Peterson