In this past weekend’s Wall Street Journal Review section Richard Brookhiser reviews four new books on Thomas Jefferson. This should be a big week for Jefferson as we celebrate the semiquincentennial anniversary of his immortal handiwork. As John Adams said in his last words, “Thomas Jefferson still survives.” Jefferson had actually died a few hours earlier, but Adams got it right in the larger sense we observe this week.
Along with his work at National Review, Brookhiser launched a second career as a historian and biographer with a focus on the Founders. He nevertheless hasn’t gotten around to Jefferson yet.
In his round-up this weekend Brookhiser includes Annette Gordon-Reed’s Jefferson on Race: A Reader. Gordon-Reed most famously found Jefferson to have fathered six children by Sally Hemings in her award-winning Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy (1997). See also her The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (2008). But it ain’t necessarily so. See The Jefferson Hemings Controversy: Report of the Scholars Commission (2000, background here).
Brookhiser’s summary of the Gordon-Reed book belied my expectations:
Annette Gordon-Reed’s tone in “Jefferson on Race” is more forgiving [than that of the authors of the first book reviewed]. Ms. Gordon-Reed, a professor of history at Harvard, won fame when her 1997 book “Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy,” which argued that master and slave had a long-term liaison, was subsequently bolstered by a DNA test showing a Jefferson chromosome among one line of Hemings’s descendants. Ms. Gordon-Reed writes of Jefferson almost like family: Family members can hurt us, but they remain our relatives. “Jefferson on Race” collects an array of his writings about blacks and Native Americans, ranging from state papers to plantation records….
Jefferson viewed Native Americans as an interesting Other; he addressed and described them, writes Ms. Gordon-Reed, with a mixture of “admiration and romanticization, along with [a] patronizing tone.” The blacks in his life, almost all of them his own slaves—he owned 200 at the time of his death—provoked two widely different reactions. In “Notes on the State of Virginia” he acknowledged that in endowments of the heart—he cited integrity, benevolence, gratitude and fidelity—nature “will be found to have done them justice.” In “endowments of the head,” however, he wrote that they were lacking: “in reason much inferior” to whites, while “in imagination they are dull, tasteless and anomalous.” Yet, Ms. Gordon-Reed notes, Jefferson’s “actions and words in other contexts . . . contravene almost everything he has to say in the ‘Notes.’” He assigned black men complex and responsible jobs. One slave, George Granger, became an overseer at Monticello; Granger’s son, George Jr., ran the nail factory there. A free black man, Patrick Henry, was caretaker of Jefferson’s property at the Natural Bridge, some 80 miles away.
Whole thing here.
