The Essentials: Five Books on Thomas Jefferson
A Jefferson expert provides a list of indispensable reads about the founding father
- By Megan Gambino
- Smithsonian.com, November 08, 2011, Subscribe
Historian Marc Leepson is the author of seven books, including Saving Monticello (2001), a comprehensive history of the house built by Thomas Jefferson and the hands it passed through since his death in 1826.
Here, Leepson provides a list of five must-reads for a better understanding of the author of the Declaration of Independence and the third president of the United States.
Jefferson and His Time, by Dumas Malone
This classic biography of Thomas Jefferson, written by one of the most renowned Jefferson scholars, was published in six volumes over 33 years. It consists of Jefferson the Virginian (1948), covering his childhood through his drafting of the Declaration of Independence; Jefferson and the Rights of Man (1951), about his years as a minister to France and secretary of state; Jefferson and the Ordeal of Liberty (1962), leading up through his presidential election; Jefferson the President: First Term, 1801-1805 (1970) and Jefferson the President: Second Term, 1805-1809 (1974); and The Sage of Monticello (1981), about the last 17 years of his life, as his priorities changed from politics to family, architecture and education. In 1975, author Dumas Malone won the Pulitzer Prize for history for the first five volumes.
From Leepson: Malone is a Jefferson partisan, but his scholarship is impeccable.
American Sphinx (1996), by Joseph J. Ellis
National Book Award winner Joseph J. Ellis’ newest book, First Family, takes on the relationship between Abigail and John Adams. But a decade and a half ago, the Mount Holyoke history professor made Thomas Jefferson—and his elusive, complicated and sometimes duplicitous nature—the subject of American Sphinx. “The best and worst of American history are inextricably entangled in Jefferson,” he wrote in the New York Times in 1997.
The book—one volume in length and written in layman’s terms—is perhaps a more digestible read than Malone’s series. “While I certainly hope my fellow scholars will read the book, and even find the interpretation fresh and the inevitable blunders few, the audience I had in my mind’s eye was that larger congregation of ordinary people with a general but genuine interest in Thomas Jefferson,” writes Ellis in the preface.
From Leepson: An insightful, readable look at Jefferson’s character.
Twilight at Monticello (2008), by Alan Pell Crawford
Alan Pell Crawford, a former political speechwriter and Congressional press secretary who now covers history and politics, pored over archives across the country, at one point holding a residential fellowship at the International Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello, to research this book. And the digging paid off. He found documents and letters of Jefferson’s relatives and neighbors, some never before studied, and pieced them together into a narrative of the president’s twilight years. During this far from restful period, Jefferson experienced family and financial dramas, opposed slavery on principle and yet, with slaves working on his own plantation, did not actively push to abolish it, and founded the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.
From Leepson: The best treatment by far of Jefferson’s life post-presidency (1809-26).
The Jefferson Image in the American Mind (1960), by Merrill D. Peterson
“The most important thing in my education was my dissertation,” said Merrill D. Peterson in 2005, about his time studying at Harvard in the late 1940s. Instead of researching the president’s life, Peterson focused on his afterlife, studying the lasting impact he had on American thought.
The idea became the basis of his first book, The Jefferson Image in the American Mind, published in 1960. And the book, which won a Bancroft Prize for excellence in American history, established Peterson as a Jefferson scholar. After stints teaching at Brandeis University and Princeton, Peterson filled the big shoes of Jefferson biographer Dumas Malone as the Thomas Jefferson Foundation Professor of History at the University of Virginia. He wrote Jefferson and the New Nation, a 1970 biography of the president, among other books, and edited the Library of America edition of Jefferson’s collected writings.
From Leepson: A revealing history of Jefferson’s historical reputation from the 1820s to the 1930s.
The Hemingses of Monticello (2008), by Annette Gordon-Reed
Harvard law and history professor Annette Gordon-Reed tells the story of three generations in the family of Sally Hemings, a slave of Thomas Jefferson’s thought to have bore him children. She starts with Elizabeth Hemings, born in 1735, who with Jefferson’s father-in-law, John Wayles, had Sally, and then follows the narrative through Sally’s children. Without historical evidence, no one can be certain of the nature of Jefferson’s relationship with Hemings. But Gordon-Reed argues that it was a consensual romance. She won the 2008 National Book Award for nonfiction, the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for history and, in 2010, a MacArthur “genius grant.”
From Leepson: No list would be complete without a book on Jefferson, slavery and the Hemings family. This is the best one.
Subscribe now for more of Smithsonian's coverage on history, science and nature.
Comments (1)
Three aspects of the Jefferson-Hemings story give me pause.
(1) When all this first came to light there were some historians who said that another man in the Jefferson family was the more likely source of the Hemings’ offspring. For one thing, he was younger than the then elderly Thomas Jefferson and, second, he had a reputation for enthusiastically socializing with the household staff. It was further said that any Jefferson-Hemings genetic evidence today would be identical had either man been involved.
(2) Not long after the Hemings story first appeared--without at least my ever having heard how this other-family-member mystery was ever resolved--it was routinely, matter-of-factly reported by just about every news outlet and periodical, with the possible exception of the Prima Ballerina Bulletin and the Timbuktu Valley Shopper and Dining Out Guide, that Thomas Jefferson had indeed sired Hemings’ offspring, the information reported as if it were no less factual than Thomas Jefferson having been president.
(3) Any adult American alive today would have to have been bathyscaphe-detained for the past couple of decades not to realize that this whole Jefferson-Hemings drama is about as perfect a story as anyone could have possibly imagined when it comes to satisfying today’s reigning political correctness, wherein especially our white male Founders must be found to have had feet of clay, most particularly regarding anything having to do with their deep dark smoldering racial sins and hypocrisies. Whereupon we can all cry “Horrors!” confirm our modern moral superiority and begin the healing process of our deeply traumatized psyches.
Of course this does not mean the story is untrue, but rather than immediately jumping through the hoop to where political correctness demands that we be, shouldn’t we first, foremost always try to move ever closer to the factual truth, no matter how difficult and no matter where the facts may lead?
Posted by Thomas Michael Andres on November 22,2011 | 12:19 AM