It is tempting to think of Thomas Jefferson as a pretender. Despite his signficant contribution to founding this republic, some argue, the man himself was so loaded with character contradictions and hypocrisies as to diminish his legacy. To start with, Jefferson lived the life of a wealthy Virginia planter, but left his estate in significant debt when he died. Jefferson often wrote of how much he hated politics, but spent much of his adult life in political office or embroiled in political battles, most notably with Alexander Hamilton. As a father, he was by many accounts doting and devoted to his family, yet he left behind his two youngest daughters in America during a years long assignment as Minister to France. One of the daughters died before Jefferson, distraught, summoned her sister to France. And although he promised his dying wife never to re-marry, Jefferson eventually fathered six children with her half-sister, and his slave, Sally Hemings. Quite simply, he too often said one thing but did another; Jefferson was merely “a hypocrite who wrote 'All men are equal' and owned slaves."
But that would be an oversimplification, says historian John Boles, who takes full account of the man – triumphs and shortcomings – in his comprehensive, masterly one-volume biography “Jefferson: Architect of American Liberty” (Basic Books, 2017). After writing this “intensely satisfying” and “[perhaps] finest one-volume biography of an American president,” John Boles spoke with RealClearBooks about his subject.
Q: Readers have many choices when it comes to the third President of the United States. Jon Meacham’s “The Art of Power,” Joseph Ellis’s “American Sphinx,” and Alan Pell Crawford’s “Twilight at Monticello” are all popular and well-regarded entries in the Jefferson canon. Why should readers pick up a copy of your book?
Well, each book is very good, but also different. Jon Meacham’s book emphasizes Jefferson’s political life more than mine, and Meacham does not talk as much about Jefferson’s early intellectual work. Joseph Ellis’s book talks about five separate episodes in Jefferson’s life, skipping the secretary of state years, vice president years and much of the Monticello years. It is not a full-scale biography. Finally, Crawford zeroes in on Jefferson’s final years – the last decade and-a-half or so.
I sought to write a full life of Jefferson. I wrote this for myself first. I wanted to know Jefferson in full. His first term was successful but his second term was not successful, for example. In short, I wanted to tell that entire story – the accomplishments and the failures – because I was interested in it.
Q: As biographer, how do you parse through these conflicts and contradictions to make sense of the man? Stated differently, how do we formulate a coherent legacy out of a life susceptible to so many different interpretations?
He was a complicated person, just like many of us. There is no one single truth to anyone’s life. Although many of us want to think of ourselves as successful in business, caring husbands, loving and attentive fathers and so on, the full story probably is more complicated. Maybe we succeeded professionally, but our children thought that we were sometimes inattentive or unavailable as parents. Maybe we were not always successful in all areas. You have to see Jefferson as a variety of strands, in all his fullness, as you mention in the question.
You could write purely about the political character, the intellectual character, or the slaveholder, but I did not want him to be one simple character. Like a symphony, all the different sounds and parts should come together into one piece. It is my responsibility as an historian to juggle the different aspects of his life, like Jefferson did himself. Yes, I think it was kind of silly that he was always equivocating about what to do next, longing to return home to Monticello just as he embarked on a new assignment as secretary of state or vice president.
Throughout it all, though, Jefferson loved the life of the mind. I wonder if he may have been a scientist or a professor had he lived in a quieter era. Many of the Founding Fathers really felt how important their times were, and they had a duty to rise to that occasion. They were caught up in a sense of wonder about their time. Jefferson really embodies this.
Q: You contribute much to the ongoing debate about how modern Americans should regard Thomas Jefferson the slaveholder. It is a complex topic, and you give great weight to Jefferson’s own words. For instance, you write that although he owned more than 100 slaves, Jefferson considered the practice of selling slaves “shameful,” and that he only sold slaves out of “economic necessity.” But are these—and many other comments in the book on slavery—insufficient given our current social climate? Should readers accept a “do as I say, not as I do” explanation for Jefferson the slaveholder?
This is an oversimplification of the book; I am almost lamenting the choices that Jefferson made. Here is a person who spoke out and tried to act against slavery; Hamilton wouldn’t risk his career, Washington was quiet on the subject, but Jefferson spoke out against it. Still, for whatever reason, Jefferson did not have the imagination or courage or something to free his own slaves. It is absolutely frustrating.
But it is also complicated. Jefferson thought that you should not just free your slaves, but that you should give them land, too. At the time, Virginia had passed a law saying that if a landowner freed his slaves while in debt, then the freed slaves could be seized against his debt. To Jefferson, who was always in debt, it was a moral necessity to not free his slaves without also ensuring they would have the means to support themselves and secure their freedom against capture.
Additionally, and this is consistent throughout his life, Jefferson hated monarchy and believed very strongly in finding solutions by democratic processes. Even if you are morally right, Jefferson believed, the democratic process should be America’s way to solve the problem of slavery. He knew that his generation was too racist. However, he hoped that the next generation would abolish slavery outright. Little did he know that the cotton gin, invented in 1794, would perpetuate the institution for generations. It took 750,000 deaths to abolish slavery.
Jefferson’s most harmful words on race were written in Notes on the State of Virginia, the only full-length book published in his lifetime. But it’s important to note that these ideas (“the real distinctions which nature has made” between Europeans and Africans, he wrote) were a summary of beliefs widely held by European intellectuals of that period. He did not invent them. Still, I am not sure that he ever completely changed his mind. It is not clear that he ever evolved; it is equally unclear if ever acted on these beliefs.
I’ll conclude by saying that people in the past are not “just like us.” My task is to help people today to understand how people in the past thought and acted. Jefferson was prescient and beyond his times in so many ways. His genius was to take ideas that were current, synthesize those ideas and then re-state them in compelling, eternal language that lodges in the collective memory. But he failed to meet his own lofty standard when it came to slavery. I try to tease out his inner conflicts, and he leaves us disappointed in him. I see this as a tragedy.
Q: You tell the full-scale story of Thomas Jefferson in less than 600 pages (discounting the endnotes). Where should exhilarated and curious readers go to learn more once they have finished reading your book?
I hope readers will read through the “Biographical Essay” portion of the book, after the endnotes. In that section, I offer several recommendations for further reading, to include: Dumas Malone’s six volume “Jefferson and His Time”, the foundational scholarly biography of Jefferson; Merrill D. Peterson’s one-volume biography “Thomas Jefferson and the New Nation: A Biography”; and the best short biographies, “In Pursuit of Reason” by Noble E. Cunningham Jr. and “Thomas Jefferson” by Richard B. Bernstein, among many others. Further, Annette Gordon-Reed examines the topic of Jefferson and Sally Hemings with extraordinary care and sophistication in “Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings” and “The Hemingses of Monticello”.
I also recommend visiting Jefferson’s beloved Monticello. Of all the presidential and historical homes, this one probably best reflects its prior owner. Jefferson designed every aspect of that house. It represents the best architectural ideas from Europe, but it faces the West – the hope and possibility of America’s future. I think of Monticello as a brick-and-mortar memorial to Thomas Jefferson.
