Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Bio evaluates Jefferson in the context of his times
In 1962, John F. Kennedy held a dinner for Nobel Prize laureates. Opening his remarks, he famously said, “I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.” He continued, “Someone once said that Thomas Jefferson was a gentleman of 32 who could calculate an eclipse, survey an estate, tie an artery, plan an edifice, try a cause, break a horse and dance the minuet.”
That was how Jefferson was then viewed: as a Founding Father with astonishingly varied and sophisticated knowledge and accomplishments. A dozen years later came Fawn Brodie’s “Jefferson: An Intimate History,” an inquiry into Jefferson’s relations with his slaves, most specifically the possibility of sexual relations with the house servant Sally Hemings. As John B. Boles says at the outset of this magisterial biography:
“Jefferson’s complexity renders him easy to caricature in popular culture . ... Once lauded as the champion of the little man, today he is vilified as a hypocritical slave owner, professing a love of liberty while quietly driving his own slaves to labor harder in his pursuit of luxury. Surely an interpretive middle ground is possible, if not necessary. If we hope to understand the enigma that is Thomas Jefferson, we must view him holistically and within the rich context of his time and place.”
To say that this biography does so is a massive understatement. “Jefferson: Architect of American Liberty” is perhaps the finest one-volume biography of an American president. Boles, a professor of history at Rice University, has spent many years studying Jefferson’s native American South in all its mysteries, contradictions, follies and outrages, as well as its unique contributions to the national culture and literature. This biography is the culmination of a long, distinguished career.
To his study of this deeply controversial man, Boles brings an ample supply of what has been so lamentably missing in the discussion over the past half-century: a calm insistence on separating truth from rumor and a refusal to judge a man who lived more than two centuries ago by the moral, ethical and political standards of today. Boles admires Jefferson and maintains a sympathetic attitude toward him through this immensely satisfying narrative, but he does not flinch when Jefferson’s behavior and attitudes seem, according to 21stcentury standards, offensive at worst, inexplicable at best.
Because the focus in recent years has been almost entirely on Jefferson’s attitudes and actions involving slavery, it is important to recall that there was vastly more to his long life than this. Boles briskly but authoritatively takes Jefferson from his birth in Virginia in 1743 to his death, on July 4, 1826.
As Boles notes, the world into which Jefferson was born was so different from our own that we are hard-pressed to imagine it, yet it was out of this distant world that our own eventually emerged, and Jefferson was at the very center. He wrote the immortal Declaration of Independence, which gave voice to the convictions and hopes that impelled his fellow colonists into revolution.
The accomplishments of his presidency are well known. He lived for more than 15 years after his presidency ended, and while he continued to be active in public life, he found his greatest pleasures in Monticello and with family.
He was a creature of his own time, not of ours, and at the end of this superb, utterly riveting biography, Boles strikes exactly the right note. He describes the “simple obelisk” erected over Jefferson’s grave at Monticello: “It was a simple marker for a man of vast accomplishments and complexities, the supreme spokesman of America’s promise. Ironically, today he is often found wanting for not practicing the principles he articulated best. Yet Jefferson ... more than anyone else was the intellectual architect of the nation’s highest ideals. He will always belong in the American pantheon.”