Thomas Jefferson’s Lives: Biographers and the Battle for History ed. by Robert M. S. McDonald

Abstract

Reviewed by: Thomas Jefferson’s Lives: Biographers and the Battle for History ed. by Robert M. S. McDonald Edith Gelles Thomas Jefferson’s Lives: Biographers and the Battle for History. Edited by Robert M. S. McDonald. Foreword by Jon Meacham. Afterword by Gordon S. Wood. Jeffersonian America. (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2019. Pp. xxxii, 311. $35.00, ISBN 978-0-8139-4291-9.) The word Lives in this title may be interpreted in several ways, as shown in this marvelous new collection of essays, finely edited by Robert M. S. McDonald. The essays originated at a 2012 conference at Monticello to commemorate Peter S. Onuf, one of this generation’s master historians of Thomas Jefferson. Each of the other master historians featured in this volume examines the biographical interpretations of a particular era during the nearly two centuries since the third president’s death in 1826, excluding the present generation of Jefferson biographers. Interest in the third president has not flagged since his death; the mythologizing of Jefferson has been of industrial proportions. That is one way to read the titular “Lives.” Another way is that, with each generation, the perception of Jefferson’s character has shifted, reflecting the biographer’s own times. As Jon Meacham writes in the foreword, “there is no such thing as a totally objective life. Biographies . . . often belong to the ages in which they were written no matter how hard some historians may try It can be no other” (p. x). Finally, reading Lives in its verb form, it is clear that Jefferson still baffles biographers, and the challenge to define him continues. R. B. Bernstein, in his fine essay on Dumas Malone, quotes Hermione Lee that biography is “‘a mixed, unstable genre, whose rules keep coming undone [and] the only rule that holds good is that there is no such thing as a definitive biography’” (p. 220). In the end, it is fair to say that the essayists agree with Joseph J. Ellis’s incisive 1997 portrait of Jefferson as the “American Sphinx,” an icon that remains a puzzle. Thomas Jefferson’s Lives: Biographers and the Battle for History is divided into three sections, reflecting the chronology of the biographies. Part 1, “Memory,” begins with a reflection on Jefferson’s own failed efforts to write a memoir, which is followed by a series of essays about the biographers who either knew Jefferson or knew people who were familiar with the paterfamilias. This group includes an adulatory great-granddaughter, Sarah N. Randolph, who, as the late Jan Ellen Lewis points out, emphasized Jefferson’s dislike of public life and claimed he “entered politics only out of ‘a lurking desire to leave to his children the honor’” (p. 87). Not all of the early authors were so romantic [End Page 449] or self-serving in their works. They emphasized Jefferson’s public life and his public service while suppressing his personal life, a slant that, in the period between the early nineteenth century and the Civil War, meant allowing scant attention to slavery, to Jefferson’s absence from public service during the Revolutionary War, and yes, to the scandalous story of his relationship with Sally Hemings. This rumor circulated after 1802, when the journalist James Callender published a reference to Jefferson’s so-called illicit affair. None of these essayists can get away from the subject of Jefferson’s relationship with Hemings, perhaps a telling reflection of the current generation’s contextual focus. The conclusive evidence surfaced in 1998 when the scientific certainty of DNA confirmed the paternity of Hemings’s children. Earlier historians, like Henry S. Randall, whom Andrew Burstein insightfully analyzes along with James Parton, attributed paternity to Jefferson’s nephews, the notorious reprobates, the Carr brothers. Burstein’s Randall “showcased [Jefferson] as the most well-rounded, refined, and resilient of the founders”; “Randall’s work served as justification for all future monuments to the Jefferson whose ‘spirit-stirring pen’ enshrined a world-transformative humanism” (p. 63). Parton’s 1872–1873 biography echoed that sentiment: “‘If Jefferson was wrong, America is wrong. If America is right, Jefferson was right’” (pp. 77–78). In a transitional essay to the second part, Richard...