If you decided you wanted to read one book on Founding Father
Thomas Jefferson, and were confronted with two titles from which
to choose, the catchy AMERICAN SPHINX and the infelicitous,
understated UNDERSTANDING THOMAS JEFFERSON, which would you be
inclined to choose? For me, it would have been AMERICAN SPHINX,
with its implied promise of illuminating the paradoxes and
contradictions in the life of our third president. Add that
AMERICAN SPHINX won a National Book Award and the choice should be
clear. Consequently, it was not by design that Halliday's
book popped into my
hands. But I do not regret it for a moment.
We all are familiar with the highlights of Jefferson's life - governor of Virginia and founder of its state university, author of the Declaration of Independence, slave-holding gentlemen farmer, the president who authorized the Louisiana Purchase (without which, the notion of America as world power is laughable). But none of these public roles tell us of the man himself, nor hint at why JFK once welcomed a group of Nobel Laureates to the White House for a state dinner with the comment (paraphrased) that "there's more brain power in this room than at any other time, except perhaps when Thomas Jefferson dined alone."
By examining the 18,000 letters written by Jefferson over the course of his life, and their replies, and by scrupuluosly tracing the breadth of his interests, while at Monticello, while serving as special ambassador to France, and while participating in the creation of the American republic, Halliday creates a portrait of a complex, intellectually-ambitious polymath who struggled with the cataclysmic changes his world was undergoing.
But Halliday does something else, which was for me the highlight
of the book. He relates the tortured history of Jeffersonian
scholarship over the last 200 years, documenting the systematic
cover-up from most historians until the early 1970s, of
Jefferson's 30-year affair with his wife's half-sister, the slave
girl Sally Hemings. It was Fawn Brodie's ground-breaking
biography THOMAS JEFFERSON: AN INTIMATE PORTRAIT that first took
seriously the contemporaneous slave narratives that initially
announced the liaison. Then, recently, DNA evidence has
confirmed that Jefferson fathered four kids by Ms. Hemings, and
raised them in a manner so that they could obtain their
freedom. Halliday points out that subsequent Jeffersonian
biographical treatments like Joseph Ellis's AMERICAN SPHINX, while
seeming insightful, are actually hagiographies more interested in
protecting Jefferson's sainted reputation as Founding Father than
delving deeply into the contradictions that Jefferson must have
felt from being both a slave-owner and a secret
miscegnationist. This raised an age-old American problem:
How can we ever respect our history if we bowdlerize it? Why
do Americans have such an aversion to looking at the darker sides
of their
natures? Are we really better off pretending we just don't
see?
Dialogue on favorite books with Deane Rink before and during his latest trek to Antarctica, with a note from Bill Ransom and a digression about Frank Herbert (a.k.a Bookbabble 101) -- a very long and rapidly growing document:
Book reviews by Richard Seltzer