‘Most Blessed’ takes a new look at Thomas Jefferson’s contradictions
As anybody resigned to spending a small fortune to see Broadway’s hottest hip-hop musical will tell you, Alexander Hamilton’s stock among America’s Founding Fathers presently is way up. This means, in the shorthand of historic dualism, that Thomas Jefferson’s stock is now way down. The song “What’d I Miss,” that introduces Jefferson’s character in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s “Hamilton,” depicts him as a clueless, two-faced dilettante. Which pretty much sums up how the author of the Declaration of Independence is faring these days in the popular imagination.
The distinctions between the two men have been parsed through generations of high school history classes: Hamilton, the orphaned immigrant who became the first U.S. treasury secretary and an advocate of expanded federal powers, forever poised against Jefferson, the Virginia farmer-polymath-slaveholder who became the third U.S. president and abiding hero to those who believe that government is best when governing least. Both men were, of course, far more complicated than this.
In “Most Blessed of the Patriarchs: Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of the Imagination,” Pulitzer Prizewinning historian Annette Gordon-Reed teams up with Jefferson scholar Peter S. Onuf. “Neither a running critique of Jefferson’s failures nor a triumphant catalog of his successes,” as the authors write, the book doesn’t clear Jefferson’s name so much as reframe the context in which his life and ideas are examined.
Not a strictly chronological biography, “Most Blessed” examines elements of Jefferson’s life through such themes as “Home,” “Plantation,” “Politics” and even “Music.” Throughout, Gordon-Reed and Onuf judiciously and incisively sift through their subject’s letters, speeches and writings, notably his 1785 “Notes on the State of Virginia,” a detailed examination of post-Revolutionary War society that was Jefferson’s only full-length book published in his lifetime and, thus, the closest thing to his personal vision of an ideal society.
That vision, as with the man himself, was fraught with paradox: On the one hand, his “Notes” condemned slavery as an “injustice” that “turned whites into tyrants and impaired their capacity for self-control,” the authors write. Yet although he acknowledged that slavery was at odds with his ideals of human liberty, Jefferson also believed he “could still have enslaved people’s best interests at heart” with an “enlightened” patriarchal approach to the institution. In the meantime, he anticipated “a revolution of public opinion” that “through republican means” would end slavery and “redeem the commonwealth.”
These days, skeptical Americans see such a tightrope walk as emblematic of Jefferson’s indulgence in having things both ways. His fellow Virginian, Chief Justice John C. Marshall, characterized Jefferson as the “‘great lama of the mountains’” or, as Gordon-Reed and Onuf interpret it, “a mysterious figure hopelessly out of touch with the real world.” Yet as hard as they, too, are on Jefferson’s inconsistencies, they seek some saving graces. While the book’s authors regard Jefferson’s “faith in the future” to resolve the slavery question as “absurdly misplaced,” they acknowledge that he at least did “see a way forward.”
In an age such as ours, where certainties are tweeted, proclaimed and feverishly sought in the public domain, Jefferson’s seeming embrace of contradiction and paradox is frustrating. Gordon-Reed and Onuf share this pain. But in the end, they, too, seem to embrace, if warily, Jefferson’s vagabond imaginings and ideas as embodying America’s willful, constant impulse to revise and reinvent itself. If history is any guide, the pendulum that now swings in Hamilton’s favor will surely swerve back toward Jefferson — and “Most Blessed of Patriarchs” submits the first, convincing brief for that shift.