Jefferson's Ideas Research Articles

The Illimitable Freedom of the Human Mind: Thomas Jefferson's Idea of a University by Andrew J. O'Shaughnessy

The Illimitable Freedom of the Human Mind: Thomas Jefferson's Idea of a University by Andrew J. O'Shaughnessy

Rival Visions: How Jefferson and His Contemporaries Defined the Early American Republic ed. by Dustin Gish and Andrew Bibby

Reviewed by: Rival Visions: How Jefferson and His Contemporaries Defined the Early American Republiced. by Dustin Gish and Andrew Bibby Cara Rogers Rival Visions: How Jefferson and His Contemporaries Defined the Early American Republic. Edited by Dustin Gish and Andrew Bibby. Jeffersonian America. ( Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2021. Pp. xii, 330. $42.50, ISBN 978-0-8139-4447-0.) The contributors to Rival Visions: How Jefferson and His Contemporaries Defined the Early American Republicagree on two primary assertions: the early republic can best be understood by using Thomas Jefferson's ideas as a "benchmark" against which to measure change; and modern debates over American identity have been "overtaken" both by a "disturbing ideological [End Page 149]conformity" and by "dogmatic partisanship" (p. 2). This collection of essays seeks to inject historical context into contemporary partisan divides by focusing attention on the rivalries that have shaped America from the beginning. As John Ragosta puts it in his chapter on Jefferson, James Madison, and John Adams, "conversations in the Early Republic were oftentimes more informative than monologues" (p. 178). Rival Visionsputs differing perspectives from the early republic into conversation with one another, emphasizing "conflict more than consensus" and encompassing such varied themes as constitutional debates, technological developments, and philosophical divergences (p. 3). The political theorists, biographers, historians, and constitutional scholars who have contributed to this volume were originally inspired by a 2013 conference on Jefferson and his contemporaries held at Christopher Newport University. Editors Dustin Gish and Andrew Bibby have divided the eleven essays into three sections: "Envisioning the New Nation," "National Tensions in the Early Republic," and "Constitutional Controversies." This division is less chronological than thematic, and readers will find variety within each section. For example, in Part 1, Eran Shalev explores the different historical antecedents that the Founders drew on in order to validate their republican experiment; Darren Staloff argues that Jefferson and Adams's fundamental difference lay in their disagreement over human perfectibility; and Gish and Armin Mattes each position the Founders' experiences with—and divergent reactions to—the French Revolution as a key element to our understanding of the early American nation. In Part 2, complementary essays by Christa Dierksheide and Peter S. Onuf contain insightful discussions of Jefferson and slavery, examining Jefferson's attempts to ameliorate the institution and contrasting Jefferson's optimistic faith in enlightenment with George Washington's quiet pragmatism. Essays by Daniel Dreisbach and Ragosta are more openly in debate, offering competing interpretations of Jefferson's support for religion in the public sphere. Dreisbach argues that most of the founding generation believed that religion was necessary for virtue, and virtue for a republic, concluding that even the unorthodox Jefferson's policies and practices "had the effect of raising religion's profile and extending its influence into the public sphere" (p. 153). Ragosta, in contrast, focuses on three separate "conversations" in Jefferson's life in order to claim that the separation of church and state was, in fact, Jefferson's primary aim—and, by the early nineteenth century, one of his greatest accomplishments (p. 164). Dreisbach and Ragosta are both persuasive, and their conversation offers a useful overview of current debates surrounding religion in the early republic. Part 3 includes Jean Yarbrough's essay on Jefferson's moral sense philosophy and its connection to an agrarian lifestyle; Daniel Klinghard's analysis of Jefferson's views on technology, progress, and politics; and Charles Hobson's fascinating comparison of Jefferson and one of his most prominent rivals, John Marshall. Hobson convincingly argues that personal animosity and decades of misunderstandings and offenses between these two Virginians prevented them from ever reconciling and finding that their rival visions of America actually had several areas of overlap. This essay is a fitting end to a book that begins by [End Page 150]lamenting Americans' current ideological divisions: Hobson provides a timely warning against allowing personal animosity to cloud reasoned political debate. Rival Visionswill be of interest to all scholars of Jeffersonian America. Cara Rogers Ashland University Copyright © 2022 The Southern Historical Association

Jefferson's Daughters: Three Sisters, White and Black, in a Young America by Catherine Kerrison

Reviewed by: Jefferson's Daughters: Three Sisters, White and Black, in a Young America by Catherine Kerrison Aston Gonzalez (bio) Keywords Thomas Jefferson, Martha Jefferson Randolph, Maria Jefferson Eppes, Harriet Hemings, Sally Hemings, Monticello Jefferson's Daughters: Three Sisters, White and Black, in a Young America. By Catherine Kerrison. (New York: Ballantine Books, 2018. Pp. 448. Cloth, $28.00.) In Jefferson's Daughters, Catherine Kerrison examines an impressive array of historical sources to distinguish the complex lives of Martha [End Page 352] Jefferson Randolph, Mary "Maria" Jefferson Eppes, and Harriet Hemings. The former two women, the daughters of Martha Wayles Jefferson, and the latter, the enslaved daughter of Sally Hemings, led lives that diverged greatly from one another. Aimed mainly at a general audience, the book largely explains in three sections—each roughly dedicated to each daughter—the circumstances foisted upon them, and the decisions they made that sometimes challenged social norms. The three sections of the book move from Martha to Maria to Harriet, and correspondingly from the largest primary-source base to the smallest. Kerrison relies on personal correspondence, so it is not surprising that she provides readers with substantially clearer and more robust views of the lives and inner thoughts of Jefferson's two white daughters. Her voluminous archive supplies glimpses of Martha and Maria's challenges to their father's authority and their assertions of autonomy. Kerrison reconstructs the intimate conversations and friendships between Martha and her friends in the City of Light to bring readers into the world of their Parisian education and entertainment. Impressive are Kerrison's portrayals of Martha's emerging attraction to Catholicism and her apprehension about leaving France for Virginia. Kerrison convincingly presents a picture of a serious, but playful, and intellectually curious daughter whose interest in "male" topics afforded by her progressive Enlightenment education placed her on track to challenge Jefferson's stagnant expectations about women's roles back home. In her interpretation of the life of Jefferson's younger daughter, Maria, Kerrison shifts the focus from her relationship with her father to her relationship with her husband (171). She skillfully analyzes a single sentence written by Maria's husband, Jack Eppes, to Jefferson to show how the couple consulted each other before rejecting Jefferson's repeated proposal that they live very near Monticello. Still, Kerrison overemphasizes Maria's emotional maturity, especially during her childhood, given the evidence presented. The decision to leave Monticello due to her husband's career may instead be evidence of Maria conforming to gendered marriage expectations. Regardless, Kerrison productively shifts the primary focus to Maria as a means of de-centering Jefferson's control over her life. Throughout the book, Kerrison engages numerous bodies of scholarship that provide a foundation and offer an opening for her fresh understanding of Jefferson's daughters. She offers a corrective to scholars who have not taken Maria on her own terms. The thin collection of letters [End Page 353] authored by Maria makes that difficult given all of the correspondence about her, yet Kerrison expertly contextualizes her life and impressively triangulates Maria's agency and constraints. She takes issue with Jefferson biographer Dumas Malone, who claimed that Jefferson "did not succeed in molding his daughter [Maria] in his own image" (87). Given the preponderance of evidence that Kerrison marshals, it seems unlikely this was Jefferson's desire given his belief in innate and intended differences between men and women, regardless of their filial relationship to him. Incorporating the scholarship of architectural historians whose work underscores how the design of Monticello conveyed the intended order sought by Jefferson adds further to Kerrison's comprehensive analysis of Monticello's hierarchies. Furthermore, Kerrison's writing is clear and often witty, especially when she details the lives of Jefferson's white daughters, and immediately undercuts their elite pleasures with the harsh realities of the enslaved people toiling to build Jefferson's idea of himself. On the particular subject of the Hemingses at Monticello, Kerrison is in close conversation with Annette Gordon-Reed's work about the enslaved people at Monticello.1 Just as Martha passed along the lessons of her French education to her children, Sally Hemings likely passed on to her children...

Institutions and Ideology in the Slave South

Institutions and Ideology in the Slave South Douglas Ambrose (bio) Alfred L. Brophy. University, Court, and Slave: Pro-Slavery Thought in Southern Colleges and Courts and the Coming of the Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. xxvi + 373 pp. Illustrations, timeline, notes, and index. $39.95. Jennifer Oast. Institutional Slavery: Slaveholding Churches, Schools, Colleges, and Businesses in Virginia, 1680–1860. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016. xi + 264 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $99.99. In November 1785, more than 150 "free Inhabitants of the County of Lunenberg," Virginia, affixed their names to a petition to the General Assembly. Aroused by a "daring attempt … to wreste from us … the most valuable and indispensable Article of our property, our Slaves, by a general Emancipation of them," the petitioners reminded their representatives of what the recent Revolution—to their minds—was all about. When the British Parliament "usurp'd a right to Dispose of our Property" and sought "to establish a principle which might one day prove fatal to our rights of Property … we dissolved our union with our parent Country" in order "to fix a Tenure in our property on a Basis of Security not to be shaken in the future." Talk of emancipation aroused their anger, for such an action would have betrayed what they had fought for: "Title to the full, free, and absolute Enjoyment of every species of Property, whatsoever, or howsoever legally acquired." Aware that several prominent Virginians endorsed the idea of general emancipation, these "free independent Citizens" insisted that their efforts to secure their property constituted a "Purchase of too great a Value to be sacrificed to the Caprice, or Interest of any rank or Description of Men, however dignified or distinguished." Confident in their understanding of the Revolution, they rose to oppose emancipation and defy any "dignified or distinguished" men who advocated it.1 The Lunenberg County petitioners, and the hundreds of other white Virginians who signed similar petitions in 1784 and 1785, remind us that the meaning of the Revolution found expression among countless common people as well as the elite. Their understanding of that meaning should caution us against [End Page 588] seeing the Revolution as necessarily in tension with slavery. The petitioners sought to protect their private property in human beings as well as in land. And they declared that the "sacred Constitution" of Virginia best expressed and secured the meaning of the Revolution. Our modern obsession with the Declaration of Independence too often leads us to see it, especially its second paragraph, as the "sacred" text of the Revolution. However valuable the Declaration and that now-famous second paragraph may have been to the development of modern Americans' sense of themselves and their national mission, the petitioners demonstrate that many Americans after 1776 understood equality to be compatible with slavery. Legal historian Alfred Brophy opens his important and valuable book by claiming that "'the Influence of America on the Mind' … was toward freedom, toward the Enlightenment truths that all people are created equal" (p. xiii). He further asserts that "the origins of Thomas Jefferson's ideas for the Declaration of Independence lie in Virginia," especially "in Williamsburg, where he attended William and Mary and absorbed the Enlightenment ideas that drove our country's Revolution" (p. 1). So begins Brophy's tale of declension. The South, or more specifically its intelligentsia, "moved away from beliefs in universal truths and began to laugh at concepts like Thomas Jefferson's statement in the Declaration of Independence that 'all men are created equal'" (p. 3). Brophy does not consider whether "the" Enlightenment spoke in one voice regarding "universal truths," especially the "truths" that "all men are created equal" or whether "Enlightenment ideas" "drove our country's Revolution." Instead, he assumes that everyone in America began with the same set of beliefs and that somehow the South experienced "the loss of the idea of freedom" (p. xiv). His book, at one level, seeks to explain this "loss"—this long, steep decline from "the idea of freedom" to the triumph of a proslavery ideology that constituted a "departure from the Revolutionary era's focus on abstract and universal truths" (p. 4). The academics, lawyers...

Nature’s Man: Thomas Jefferson’s Philosophical Anthropology by Maurizio Valsania (review)

Nature's Man: Thomas Jefferson's Philosophical Anthropology. By Maurizio Valsania. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2013. Pp. 204. Cloth, $35.00.)Reviewed by Lorri GloverIn Nature's Man, Maurizio Valsania offers a nuanced and theoretically sophisticated exploration of Thomas Jefferson's ideas about human nature, the qualities he idealized in individuals, and the importance of community to that worldview-his philosophical anthropology. In just over 150 pages of text, the work manages to link a stunning range of topics without ever feeling forced or fleeting. The three chapters read like an extended essay, weaving together what often can seem like disparate pieces to Jefferson's long career and varied writings to give a fresh take on one of the most-studied people in American history.Valsania clearly has a strong command of Jefferson's writings and ideas, and this book is written with confidence and verve. The author is equally adept when contemplating Jefferson's views on women and Native Americans as he is in discussions of Jefferson's land policies while president and attitudes toward equality and equal rights. offers novel insight on often-read Jefferson writings, including, most notably, his head and heart letter to Maria Cosway, A Summary View on the Rights of British America, and the long-delayed, much-celebrated campaign for disestablishment in Virginia, predicated on Jefferson's 1779 proposal to the Virginia legislature. In the latter case, Valsania convinces the reader that, taken with Jefferson's other legislative efforts that year, the Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom captures Jefferson's distinctive perception of the individual in community, an effort at privileging individuals over their community, and thus underscores the differences between our world and his. Valsania also presents a reinterpretation of Jefferson's retirement years and what has often been seen as a narrowing of his worldview after leaving the presidency. Age and parochialism are over-argued, Valsania maintains; rather, Jefferson's increasing localism derived from a judicious re-evaluation of political and economic circumstances, characteristic of his enduring experimental temper (70).Embedded in that last interpretation is a thread running through the book: Valsania's seeming admiration for Jefferson. Several times throughout these chapters, the reader is cautioned against dismissing Jefferson as an inconsistent hypocrite. But how many serious scholars-the audience for the book-would contemplate making such a bald, ahistorical judgment? Moreover, Valsania insists that his intent is not to perform a moral evaluation of Jefferson's character, to condemn or acquit him. But in the same paragraph, after considering Jefferson's conduct while governor of Virginia and president of the United States, Valsania writes: He was eminently principled, responsible, and coherent. never acted randomly or for a personal or momentary interest (113).While readers will likely quarrel with that sanguine appraisal, they will also have to be impressed with the sensitivity with which Valsania reads only Jefferson's texts but his context, too. …

Thomas Jefferson Versus the Historians: Christianity, Atheistic Morality, and the Afterlife

For many years, the Religious Right has argued that Thomas Jefferson's “wall of separation” metaphor, expounded in his address to the Danbury Baptist Association in 1802, did not reflect his true views on cooperation between Church and State; and that he was actually a devout Christian who embraced a symbiotic relationship between them. Recent scholarship, concurring with these views, contends that Jefferson's thoughts and actions, both in political office and as a private individual, reflected his desire for government participation in religious ceremonies and his sincere dedication to the Christian faith. This article refutes such arguments. It compares Jefferson's ideas with John Adams's more orthodox opinions, particularly in their attitudes toward the connection between atheism and personal morality. The article notes that Jefferson, while endorsing Jesus' ethical teachings, also embraced philosophical materialism. He probably did not believe in an afterlife. Jefferson's most thoroughgoing rejection of organized Christianity occurred in old age, when his fading hopes for religious reform latched onto Unitarianism.

Light and Liberty: Thomas Jefferson and the Power of Knowledge ed. by Robert M. S. McDonald, and: Thomas Jefferson, Time, and History by Hannah Spahn (review)

Light and Liberty: Thomas Jefferson and the Power of Knowledge. Edited by Robert M. S. McDonald. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012. Pp. 256. Cloth, $40.00.)Thomas Jefferson, Time, and History. By Hannah Spahn. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011. Pp. 304. Cloth, $45.00.)Reviewed by Sean P. HarveyThomas Jefferson believed generations should be sovereign, but he intended to shape the instruction of younger Americans so they could preserve the revolutionary inheritance that his own generation had bequeathed. Robert McDonald's essay collection successfully illuminates the projects through which Jefferson optimistically hoped to educate the citizenry. Hannah Spahn's compelling intellectual history elaborates the views of time and history that led a more pessimistic Jefferson to suspect that history writing was unreliable, believe that historical precedent did not apply to the country, and ultimately distrust the succeeding generation. Jefferson's notions of nationhood and difference, and the actions that proceeded from them, are central to reconciling these contrasting interpretations.Light and Liberty exposes the multifaceted shape of Jefferson's educational ambition. Formal institutions were central to this vision. Focusing on the Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge (1778), Johann Neem examines Jefferson's advocacy of an active state (47) that would have created the conditions for meritocratic equality of opportunity by obliging citizens to relinquish the fruits of their labor to support locally governed public schools. That effort failed, but Jefferson successfully garnered public support for two institutions of higher education. He pushed for a U.S. Military Academy, Christine Coalwell McDonald and Robert M. S. McDonald convincingly argue, as a means to advance the exploration and development of the West. The academy would train the engineers necessary to advance American agriculture and extractive industries, and teach French skills useful for communicating with Louisiana inhabitants and participants in the fur trade. Cameron Addis provides a provocative sketch of the early history of the University of Virginia, which Jefferson established in the hopes of creating a secular ethical education. His contextualization of this effort in the growing strength of revivalism on college campuses and in the wider culture is especially useful, though he mistakenly asserts that New York University existed in 1822, whereas the Jeffersonian Albert Gallatin and other New Yorkers did not begin organizing the institution until 1830-1831.Other efforts existed outside academic walls. Frank Shuffle ton describes Jefferson's use of a bibliographic and epistolary network to import useful ideas from Europe and export accurate information about America. Craig A. Reynolds sketches Jefferson's hopes to use architecture to cultivate U.S. citizens' aesthetics. While this essay never explains how some of his preferred architectural models, which dated from imperial Rome, would have inculcated republican principles, Reynolds traces how craftsmen who had worked for Jefferson most likely transmitted Jeffersonian designs for public buildings that influenced several Virginia county courthouses (172, 175, 179). Gaye Wilson provides an insightful reading of Thomas Sully's portrait of the retired president, which West Point commissioned in 1821, as an effort to teach citizens republican simplicity and to shore up his own historical reputation amid a wave of pro-Federalist historiography. Cumulatively, according to Robert McDonald's introduction, these essays reveal Jefferson's vision for a fairer, freer, more democratic America populated by citizens more capable of individual self-government (15). Joyce Appleby's provocatively critical Afterword, however, expresses surprise at the authors' unstinting admiration of Jefferson's ideas and practices, especially in light of his commitment to slavery, and argues for greater attention to the interplay of culture and politics (215). …

Thomas Jefferson and Executive Power , and: Constitutionalism, Conflict, Consent: Jefferson on the Impeachment Power (review)

Thomas Jefferson and Executive Power. By Jeremy D. Bailey. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Pp. xvi, 280. Cloth, $87.99.)Jeremy D. Bailey, Constitutionalism, Conflict, and Consent: Jefferson on the Impeachment Power, Review of Politics 70 (June 2008), 572-94.Reviewed by R. B. BernsteinWorks of history become valuable when they persuade us to abandon former ways of seeing a given historical problem in favor of a new, illuminating perspective. By this test, Jeremy D. Bailey, who teaches political science at the University of Houston, has written a truly valuable book. Thomas Jefferson and Executive Power persuades us to discard the stale, misleading dichotomy between and presidents for the far more enlightening approach of grasping how a particular president understood his office as a constitutional institution and sought to meet the challenges that that institution posed for him.For too long, historians have privileged presidents and damned the ones; in the process, they have shown magnificent lack of attention to what strong or weak might mean in historical context or whether there might be an array of models for a strong presidency. Using this test and invoking the magisterial authority of Henry Adams to back it up, historians have hailed Thomas Jefferson's successes as president while stigmatizing his vision of the presidency as limited and by comparison with the presidency advocated by his great adversary, Alexander Hamilton. Under the old view, Jefferson succeeded as president because he was a skilled politician and used his personal gifts for consensus and persuasion, though ultimately giving in to the need to wield his presidency in Hamiltonian terms.Bailey rejects this interpretation, seeking instead to determine what Jefferson understood the American presidency to be and how best to make it work. Taking seriously Jefferson's insistence that he sought to govern by reference to the views of the American people, Bailey shows that Jefferson devised an approach to the presidency conceptually distinct from the Hamiltonian vision as an office of executive command. Jefferson rooted the presidency's strength in the president's ability to connect with and give voice to the will of the people, a presidency not only consonant with but governed by public opinion. Thus, Jefferson succeeded as president when he governed in line with the public opinion that he could discern and articulate, and he failed as president when, as with his embargo policy in his second term, he increasingly found himself veering away from what public opinion was trying to tell him.As Bailey shows, Jefferson's ideas about executive power go back to his earliest involvement in constitution-making in 1776 and thus had been developing and evolving in his mind for nearly a quarter-century before he took the presidential oath in March 1801. Jefferson, as Bailey demonstrates, took his democratic ideals seriously and sought to meld them with his understanding of executive power so that he could devise a way for a chief executive to be both vigorous and legitimate, with public opinion of his words and deeds as the touchstone of legitimacy. Further, Jefferson insisted that a constitutional chief executive had to be both a vehicle for needed constitutional change, by mobilizing and mustering public opinion in its support, and a respecter of the Constitution. Previous scholars have denned these two views as forming a paradox in Jefferson's thought, whereas Bailey seeks to reconcile them and show how, in Jefferson's thinking, they were both consistent and complementary.Jefferson's method for resolving the paradox was to offer the people what he called declarations of principle, in which he both sought to voice public opinion and to educate it. (It is no accident that this method of constitutional governance was peculiarly suited to Jefferson's literary gifts, which formed one of the foundation stones of his success as a politician throughout his career. …

Mongrel Nation: The America Begotten by Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings (review)

Reviewed by: Mongrel Nation: The America Begotten by Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings Wilma King Mongrel Nation: The America Begotten by Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings. By Clarence E. Walker. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. 2009. "I want to posit in this book a new myth of origin of the United States," writes the author Clarence E. Walker, who suggests that "at the moment of its creation the nation was not a white racial space but a mixed race one" (2). Rather than positioning George and Martha Washington as "founding parents" of the United States, the author suggests that Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings replace them. Walker makes his case for the "new myth" in Mongrel Nation, a slim two-part volume containing the essays "Sexuality," and "Character and History, or 'Chloroform in Print.'" Walker acknowledges that his proposition will disturb some readers. Nevertheless, he focuses sharply on the Jefferson-Hemings nexus to answer questions about national identity, racial provenance, and who owns history. An 1802 story in the Richmond Recorder by James Thompson Callender claimed that Jefferson had fathered children with Hemings. "Interracial sex was normative," says Walker (27) yet such a charge against Jefferson, president of the United States, was "news." Besides, he had published disparaging remarks about people of African descent, especially women, in Query XIV of his Notes on the State of Virginia (1787), causing Jefferson's defenders to believe he would never become intimate with a black woman. As a result, the "news" prompted members of Jefferson's family, his admirers, and some historians to vigorously dispute Callender's charge. Jefferson's defenders remain vigilant, and their attitude is, in Walker's view, "representative of a congenital racial tension in American society" (2). [End Page 175] A brief review of the scholarship about Jefferson and Hemings spanning nearly fifty years calls attention to the continuous debate in which Annette Gordon-Reed's Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy (1997) and the 1998 DNA evidence linking Jefferson to a Hemings offspring are integral. Given the body of existing literature, one must ask what will Mongrel Nation contribute? Briefly, Mongrel Nation takes the thirty-eight-year-long Jefferson-Hemings relationship out of the "closet" and places it within a global context. The United States was part of a larger colonial settler society or plantation complex in which creolization, primarily by exploiting enslaved women, occurred. It is against this historical backdrop that Walker asks, why did intimacy between blacks and whites create angst in the United States? In actuality, it is not solely the intimacy but the resulting "mongrel nation" that has been disturbing. Whiteness, rather than an impossible mixture thereof, defined and was the criteria for American citizenship. Children resulting from white-black relationships prompted fractionized calculations or mathematical blood analyses that relegated non-whites to an outsider status in the "racial state." Mixtures threatened the creation of a "pure" republic. Within this context, Jefferson's ideas about colonizing blacks outside the United States are understandable. Writing or theorizing about people of African descent was one thing, but living with or loving them was another matter. How was that possible? Was it ambivalence about blacks that created a racial and sexual amnesia? Did that amnesia create a canonical master narrative of the United States distinguished by "unblemished whiteness?" The answer may be found in Walker's alternative readings and discussions of who Americans are as a nation. Had another Virginia planter, for example George Wythe or John Wayles rather than the esteemed Thomas Jefferson, been accused of intimacy with an enslaved woman would the results have been the same? Obviously, the answer is no, but answers to more edgy questions give pause. For example, do readers know with certainty that Sally Hemings was phenotypically black? How did she identify herself? There is no extant description of her skin color, hair texture, or facial features to determine that they were clearly Caucasoid or Negroid. Even so, one must ask if she and her half-sister, Martha Wayles, Thomas Jefferson's wife, bore a striking resemblance. Could Jefferson, a forty-one-year-old widower, have subjected Sally's identity to the mathematics of blood as he once...

Reagan and the West: How Jeffersonian Ideals Reached the 40th President

34 Historically Speaking · May/June 2006 Reagan and the West: How Jeffersonian Ideals Reached the 40th President Glen Jeansonne and David Luhrssen ^ onald Reagan made just a few ^ Westerns in a Hollywood career that spanned four decades and included leading roles in some fifty films. Yet in the perception ofhis own country and throughout the world (he was called "Ronnie Le Cowboy" in the French press), Reagan became synonymous with the Western film genre. It was not his cinematic career that sealed the association in the public mind, but his final significant role before leaving entertainment for politics as host of the popular early 1960s television series Death Valley Days. Yet Reagan relished the misconception that he was a Western star; he wore cowboy boots and a Stetson hat while entertaining on his mountaintop California ranch. The West, as understood in film and fiction rather than in history, was inseparable from Reagan's persona. It was also a source for many of his ideas, or rather, the filter through which many Jeffersonian ideals reached the 40th president. The narrative of American history was conceived in larger measure by Jefferson than any of the republic 's other founders, but its composition was left in large part to the storywriters who gave voice to Jefferson's vision on the blank pages of an imaginary West. Ronald Reagan was, in a sense, one of this narrative's final, largerthan -life characters. In his second and final autobiography, published two years after leaving the White House, Reagan quotes Jefferson no less than six times, especially on the danger of government encroachment on personal liberty. He even cites Jefferson as "the first American to frame a balanced-federal-budget-amendment ."1 But Jefferson is not mentioned in Reagan's previous autobiography, published in the 1960s as he was about to embark on a political career. This leads to the suspicion that Reagan invoked Jefferson ex-post facto tojustify the agenda of his presidency and burnish his legacy with the polish of one of the nation's founders. This is not to say that Reagan hadn't absorbed many of Jefferson's ideas. He may have been an unconscious Jeffersonian through much of his life, only discovering the roots of his worldview much later. By his own admission, Reagan cracked the books as little as possible in college, preferring football and dances to seminars and lectures . But Reagan could easily have derived many of the founder's ideas and sensibilities through the diffusion of Jeffersonian ideals in American popular culture. During Reagan's most impressionable years and in the early decades of his adulthood, few facets of American culture were more popular, and more suffused with Jefferson, than the Western genre of film and pulp fiction. Reagan never alluded to his moviegoing or reading habits as a boy in either autobiography , although he cited the popular Western author Zane Grey as a boyhood favorite in a personal letter.2 A passing recollection of his 1954 film Cattle Queen of Montana is also instructive. "Somehow working outdoors amid beautiful scenery and much of the time on horseback never has seemed like work to me. It's like getting paid for playing cowboys and Indians."3 Like most Americans of his generation, the Western mythos was in Reagan's blood.4 Cecil B. DeMille's hit The Squaw Man (1914), among the first films shot in Hollywood, helped move the previously unknown Southern California town to the center ofworld culture. The Squaw Man's story of a cultured Englishman who goes to America's West, marries a "primitive" American Indian, and sets up a ranch with her in the face of racial tension can be read as a Jeffersonian melodrama in which America's British heritage is transformed by the frontier experience . Raised as part of Virginia's planter gentry and afforded the best education and opportunities for advancement, Jefferson never traveled west of the Shenandoah Valley. But, in the words ofJefferson biographer Dumas Malone, "the great western country was a vivid reality in his mind."5 Inhabiting the West as imagined by Jefferson was one of the stock figures of Western fiction, the pioneer farmer. Jefferson composed...

Thomas Jefferson's Military Academy: Founding West Point (review)

Thomas Jefferson's Academy: Founding West Point. Edited by Robert M. S. McDonald (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2004. Pp. xix, 233. Cloth, $35.00.)Historians have long puzzled over Thomas Jefferson's many enigmas, but few have focused their attention on the role the third president played in founding the United States Academy. As Robert McDonald points out in the introductory essay for Thomas Jefferson's MiIitary Academy: Founding West Point, as late as 1997, there had been as much scholarly work on Jefferson and prairie dogs as on Jefferson and the military academy (three entries each in Frank Shuffelton's annotated bibliography), and more on Jefferson and clocks (five entries) and wines (thirty-nine) than on Jefferson and West Point. This collection of essays does much to correct the profession's failure to investigate and to understand Jefferson's role in the academy's founding.Peter Onuf's introductory essay lays out in clear terms the nature of the Jeffersonian enigma and places it in the context of the turbulent period immediately following the Revolution. Focusing on the conflicts between Federalists and Republicans over the locus and nature of federal power and on the ever more dangerous international situation resulting from the French Revolution, Onuf shows clearly Jefferson's Republicans feared both a standing army and a military academy as threats to the nation's republican ideals, with Federalists finding each necessary to their defense. But, Onuf contends, In his expansive, optimistic mode Jefferson could envision the development of an energetic, powerful central government. . . . [T]he caricature of Jefferson as an antistatist libertarian does not hold, either at the federal or state level (16). Onuf's essay thus provides the backdrop for those follow.Don Higginbotham's Military Education before West Point addresses the transmission of military knowledge to and among Americans during and after the Revolution, and it outlines the various proposals regarding the establishment of a military academy were discussed, debated, and eventually rejected in the republic's early years. Higginbotham makes clear significant intellectual groundwork had been laid for the establishment of a military academy well before Jefferson had assumed the presidency. Jennings L. Wagoner and Christine Coalwell McDonald's contribution, Mr. Jefferson's Academy: An Educational Interpretation, places Jefferson's establishment of the United States Academy (USMA) in a somewhat different light. Accepting the academy clearly was meant to train military officers, they argue convincingly it must also be seen as a function of Jefferson's desire to establish national educational institutions. Jefferson placed an enormous emphasis on education because He was convinced the future security of his 'country' . . . was tied much more directly to the general enlightenment of the population than to military strength (121). Political stability in the new republic, Jefferson believed, was to be found in the education of the nation's citizenry. Few of Jefferson's ideas in this field, including his much-desired national university, bore fruit in the 1780s or 1790s. But, once president, Jefferson could (with Congress's help) establish a military academy that would be directed toward useful national and scientific as well as military ends (131).Theodore Crackel places Jefferson's actions in the larger framework of his presidency. Agreeing with Onuf Jefferson was not opposed to an energetic government, Crackel points out Jefferson used his executive power to remove Federalist appointees or to reduce their power, and he argues Jefferson's establishment of a military academy must be viewed in the same vein. …

Les précédents du plan de Jefferson pour l'Université de Virginie

The present article explores the problem of various sources and the iconographic programme of Thomas Jefferson's project for campus of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville (1817-1826). In conclusion, the author points out that it was the sacred architecture which dominated among the possible sources of Jefferson's idea, rather that the similarly laid out royal residence of Marly-le-Roi (as many scholars had suggested). Although the campus of the University of Virginia formally draws on ecclesiastic models, it was built as a ville seculiere, where the sacred dimensions of architecture disappeared for the benefit of democratic ideals. At the time of Jefferson, the esoteric and metaphysic dimensions of architecture had disappeared and caused a sort of migration of architectural types.

Jefferson's vision for education, 1760-1845

New York, Bern, Berlin, Bruxelles, Frankfurt/M., Oxford, Wien Thomas Jefferson's ideas on education evolved over sixty years - from his adolescent years at The College of William and Mary, through the Revolution and election of 1800, to his death in 1826. In 1776, he saw public education as the cornerstone of Virginia's revolution and hoped it would help destroy aristocratic and denominational privilege, create opportunities based on merit, foster humanism and encourage the political awareness necessary for a republican society. Though limited to white males, public education was a progressive idea for its time. All his bills failed. Even though Jefferson's own machinations stymied bills for a statwide system in the 1810s, the « hobby of his old age, the University of Virginia, opened in 1825. Jefferson's Vision for Education, 1760-1845 examines why Jefferson subverted the democratic spirit of his early plans, and how well other political and religious dimensions of his vision materialized at the University of Virginia during its first twenty years.

“The Horrid Alternative”: Miscegenation and Madness in the Frontier Romance

In a speech delivered to a gathering of Delaware and Mohican Indians, Thomas Jefferson foresaw destiny of United States as a of its various races, declaring that, in the natural progress of things, Indians and whites meet and blend together...intermix, and become one people (Wald 25). He invites Indians to mix with us by and grandly prophesies, your blood will run in our veins and will spread with us over this great island (Wald 26). But even as Jefferson imagined new nation as a of whites and Indians, subsequent generation of writers who assumed responsibility of telling story of nation found it difficult to imagine what such a marriage would yield. In her survey of American frontier writing in The Land Before Her (1984), Annette Kolodny observes a studied literary on subject of white-red intermarriage (70). Scholars have since suggested that uneasiness of frontier romance with miscegenation stems from sacred myths of racial, national, and patriarchal ascendance. Racial mixing represents a fundamental contradiction to ideology of racial separatism; therefore, frontier romance, intent upon creation of a national literature, registers this contradiction as a tense silence.1 I will examine this silence more closely in Lydia Maria Child's Hobomok: A Tale of Early Times (1824), James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of Mohicans (1826), and Catherine Maria Sedgwick's Hope Leslie, or A Tale of Early Times in Massachusetts (1827). As these romances are confronted and confounded by specter of miscegenation, they drift from daylight world of historical, native realm of a solid national literature, into world of gothic, where racial hybridity is manifested not exactly as silence but more sharply as madness, degeneracy, and horror. Within these novels we find an intersection of science and sensationalism as widely-held racial theory of diminishing fertility manifests itself in romance as insanity or living death, inevitable curse invoked by unnatural mingling of white and blood. The presence of miscegenated women and half-breed figures confounds foundational categories of identity imagined by these romances-white and red, civilization and nature, future and past-and, consequently, these figures are represented as irrational, perverse, or doomed, recurring nightmare invading America's dream of itself. At same time, a tradition of hybrid texts resists this widely disseminated myth of degeneration and present alternative visions of racial mixing to those provided by critically sanctioned historical romances. James E. Seaver's A Narrative of Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison (1824), for example, published in same year as Hobomok and equal to The Last of Mohicans in popularity, offers a way to read against frontier romance in its detachment of miscegenation from its conventional gothic associations. The popularity of narrative further suggests that, contrary to critical assumptions, audiences were perhaps more receptive to Jefferson's idea of a racially mixed American future than were romance writers and reviewers. Jemison's overlooked success tells us that while reviewers strongly objected to considering miscegenation as part of formula for a literature, common readers were apparently less troubled by prospect of a heterogeneous nation and less insistent on separation of races as a necessary component of identity. This apparent gap between critical and popular responses suggests that professional readers were invested in connection between race and cultural value, that those who generally consumed such fiction were not, and that critical assumption that vanishing Indian and separatism he or she represents were integral to popularity of frontier romance deserves closer examination. …

Jefferson's Declaration of Independence: Origins, Philosophy, and Theology

Two hundred twenty years after the second Continental Congress approved the American Declaration of Independence, its principal author, Thomas Jefferson, is more and more frequently labeled radical. His words are even used to validate the agendas of today's right-wing militias. But his unorthodox religious views, which permeate the Declaration, are most deserving of the appellation. Allen Jayne analyzes the ideology of the Declaration - and its implications - by going back to the sources of Jefferson's ideas. Jayne emphasizes several sources, especially Bolingbroke, Kames, and Reid, by giving a detailed examination of portions of their writings in relation to the better-known contributions of Locke. His conclusion is that the Declaration must be read as an attack on two claims of absolute authority: that of government over its subjects and of religion over the minds of men. Today's world is far more secular than Jefferson's, and the importance of philosophical theology in eighteenth-century critical thought must be recognized in order to understand fully and completely the Declaration's implications. Jayne addresses this need by putting concerns about religion back into the discussion. Sure to be controversial, Jefferson's Declaration of Independence will contribute substantially to the contentious, ongoing debate concerning Jefferson's intentions and sources when writing the Declaration of Independence.

An Inquiry into Thomas Jefferson's Ideas of Beauty

A careful reading of eighteenth-century aesthetics provides a view of Thomas Jefferson's thinking about art and architecture quite different from the existing scholarly paradigm. Jefferson owned, read, and quoted Enlightenment philosophy and criticism, most notably that of Henry Home, known as Lord Kames. Far from privileging reason over emotion, these philosophers held that all people are created with innate senses of beauty and morality, as well as a rational faculty. Because of the sense of beauty, certain qualities in objects can inspire the idea of beauty in the mind; other ideas of beauty are comparative, requiring use of the rational faculty. Jefferson's aesthetic theory was informed by his understanding of the human mind, which led to an architecture rooted in good proportion and to didactic paintings rooted in history ancient and modern. As with other Enlightenment thinkers, Jefferson endorsed the entire classical tradition, admiring not only the architecture of ancient Rome and modern Paris but also of Palladio and the French Baroque. Similarly, he admired the work of minor Baroque painters as well as the neoclassicism of Jacques-Louis David. Nor was Jeffersonian classicism nationalistic; rather, he endorsed the Enlightenment concept of a universal and uniform standard of taste.

Every Generation Is an "Independant Nation": Colonization, Miscegenation, and the Fate of Jefferson's Children

T THOMAS Jefferson never acknowledged his mixed-race children with Sally Hemings. Little evidence of any kind exists about how he thought or felt about those children. But Jefferson did have a great deal to say about demoralizing implications of miscegenational relationships for Virginia's master class. His well-known concern, bordering on obsession, with generational sovereignty also suggests that he was sensitive to fate of his unacknowledged children with Hemings. I propose to reconsider Jefferson's life-long advocacy of African colonization for clues about how he might have understood history of his unacknowledged shadow family. By I824, when in a letter to Jared Sparks, editor of North American Review, Jefferson offered fullest exposition of his thinking about emancipation and expatriation of American slaves, his idiosyncratic approach was of little interest or relevance to movers and shakers in American Colonization Society (ACS).1 But this fascinating letter does speak, obliquely, to crucially important private as well as public issues. Jefferson's ideas about colonization were first developed in an amendment to A Bill concerning Slaves that he drafted when he was a member of committee charged with revising Virginia's laws in I779. Although, as Jefferson recalled, committee endorsed the principles of amendment-the freedom of all born after a certain day, and deportation at a proper age-the amendment was never submitted to General Assembly because the public mind would not yet bear proposition.2

Telling the Story of America

Elizabeth Broun When I take visitors through the Smithsonian American Art Museum, I begin by saying we have a wonderful collection that tells the story of the country and its people. We start with John Singleton Copley's showy portrait of Mrs. George Watson (1765; fig. 1), where the red satin gown and blue-and-white vase allude to Mr. Watson's import business in colonial Boston, a major trading center. Then we move to John Trumbull's portrait of The Misses Mary and Hannah Murray (1806; fig. 2), two would-be muses with drawing pencil and musical score, signaling new cultural ambitions in the early Republic. Next we stop near Daniel La Motte, Thomas Sully's young aristocrat seated before his Maryland estate (1812-13; fig. 3), and I mention Jefferson's idea that America should have a representative democracy, managed by wise landowners on behalf of the broader population. Soon Frank Mayer's Independence (1858; fig 4) comes into view-a rugged, self-made man lounging on his rough-hewn porch-inspiring words about Andrew Jackson's Era of the Common Man, which ushered in a more direct democracy. These are obvious points

The Establishment Clause: Religion and the First Amendment, by Leonard W. Levy

Leonard Levy's classic work examines the circumstances that led to the writing of the establishment clause of the First Amendment: 'Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion...' He argues that, contrary to popular belief, the framers of the Constitution intended to prohibit government aid to religion even on an impartial basis. He thus refutes the view of 'nonpreferentialists,' who interpret the clause as allowing such aid provided that the assistance is not restricted to a preferred church. For this new edition, Levy has added to his original arguments and incorporated much new material, including an analysis of Jefferson's ideas on the relationship between church and state and a discussion of the establishment clause cases brought before the Supreme Court since the book was originally published in 1986.

The Radical Politics of Thomas Jefferson: A Revisionist View

Richard Matthews argues that despite scores of books and hundreds of articles, Thomas Jefferson remains the most seriously misrepresented and misunderstood Founding Father. Matthews's Jefferson emerges as America's first and foremost advocate of permanent revolution, a democratic communitarian, and an anit-market theorist. this interpretation has been suggested in the past, but seldom has it been argued so persuasively or so intensely. It is Matthews's intent to extricate Jefferson from the myths that surround, envelop, and ultimately distort him. The interpretation of Jefferson's idea of democracy presented here could spark new thinking about contemporary democracy as the bicentennial of the Constitution approaches.