Rice professor wants to introduce a nuanced Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson’s place in the Founding Fathers pantheon is indisputable. The nation’s third president drafted the Declaration of Independence, after all, and oversaw the Louisiana Purchase.
But for the past few decades, a lot of people have written Jefferson off as a hypocrite — a white Southerner who talked about equality but wouldn’t free his own slaves.
Rice history professor John Boles believes that’s a pretty simplistic view. His new biography, “Jefferson: Architect of American Liberty,” offers a more comprehensive portrait, supplying nuance and context — two things, he says, that get easily swept aside by today’s culture.
Boles wanted to counter what he calls a “bumper sticker understanding” of Jefferson — but he wanted to do it
without ignoring or excusing the fact that Jefferson was a slaveholder.
Because Jefferson did, indeed, own slaves.
“He was a white man in the 18th century living in Virginia,” Boles said. For any affluent southerner, that was par for the course. But Jefferson’s story is more complicated than that.
Boles, who has taught at Rice since 1981, has received wildly positive reviews for his new book, which he’ll
sign Saturday at River Oaks bookstore. A Washington Post reviewer came out of retirement to praise the book and call it “perhaps the finest one-volume biography of an American president.”
Boles, who earned an undergraduate degree at Rice in 1965, took a course in Jeffersonian and Jacksonian democracy his senior year, which inspired a lifelong interest in Jefferson.
“I was planning to go to grad school and thought, ‘I’ll study Jefferson,’ ” he said. He planned to write a book even then. And in graduate school at the Jefferson-founded University of Virginia, he did study Jefferson, but his interests and research led elsewhere. Thus, the book Boles planned to write was nearly 50 years in the making.
And that’s a good thing, he believes. The passage of time made it quite a different book.
“The shape of southern history and American history has changed dramatically” in that time,” he said. “It was a very different prospect to think about doing a biography of Jefferson in 2013 than it would have been in 1970.”
Jefferson was “highly revered” in the 1960s, Boles said, his public image a “pretty uncomplicated portrait” of a statesman.
Then, as the country progressed, our collective view of the third president shifted: the civil rights movement, an increase in African-American studies and slave studies, and the revelation that Jefferson had a relationship (and, it is believed, several children) with one of his slaves, Sally Hemings.
“Jefferson’s reputation took a plunge,” Boles said. “He came to be seen simply as a hypocrite who wrote ‘All men are equal’ and owned slaves.”
Jefferson “had to be a bad racist guy, what else could be said? That’s true, but there’s a lot more to be said. We owe it to ourselves, if not to Jefferson, to look at him holistically — to put him in the context of his times,” Boles said.
Jefferson inherited slaves from his father and father-in-law — enough to make him one of the largest slaveholders in Virginia.
And yet, Boles said, he spoke and acted against slavery more than any other of the other Founding Fathers. He spoke against slavery privately and publicly. In fact, in his second term as president, he successfully lobbied Congress to end the Atlantic slave trade.
Jefferson was so far ahead of his time in many ways, Boles said, that we expect him to have been progressive in this way. “But he wasn’t.” And he argues in his book that “we should not expect him to have embraced the values of a cosmopolitan, progressive person of the 21st century.”
As Boles worked on this book for the past four years, Jefferson’s political rival Alexander Hamilton became a pop culture buzzword, thanks to Lin-Manuel Miranda’s runaway hit Broadway musical. Hamilton has been held up by our 21st-century culture as a hero — which also is too simple, Boles said.
The “Hamilton” phenomenon “has created an unbelievably romanticized view of Hamilton that smashes everybody else,” Boles said. “That’s a really one-sided view.”
He’s hoping that “Hamilton” piqued people’s interest in the Founding Fathers, and that some of us will give Jefferson another look.
“I’d like to think this would be a corrective,” he said.
“I’d like to think this will lead to a little more nuanced, comprehensive understanding.”