American Sphinx by Joseph J. Ellis

Of all the Founding Fathers, none were so enigmatic or mysterious as Thomas Jefferson, and yet none, save George Washington, have been so universally revered throughout American history. Today both parties claim Jefferson as one of their ideological lodestars, and, remarkably, they are both right, which shows just how varied and sometimes contradictory Jefferson's thinking was. Americans today view Jefferson as more myth than man, a figure forever engraved in marble and granite, serenely surveying the nation he helped found.

But who was Jefferson, really? As the noted historian Joseph J. Ellis writes in American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson, Jefferson was a man of immense talent, but also of massive contradiction: The idealistic visionary who penned the most powerful defense of human freedom ever written, and yet bought and sold other human beings; the austere fiscal conservative who privately spent lavishly and died deeply in debt; the agrarian aristocrat who skewered his working-class foes as elitist; the party leader who constantly lamented the power of political parties. Jefferson was, in short, a hard man to know, even for himself.

Any student of history should not be too quick to uproot men from the past and judge them by the shifting standards of our day. But even during his own lifetime, Jefferson was fiercely criticized as a hypocritical, paranoid, untrustworthy man, captivated by fanciful--even dangerous--utopian fantasies. His critics were mostly right.

Jefferson's fundamental misunderstanding of the differences between the American and French revolutions (the first was a rebellion against governmental tyranny, the second was a rebellion against civilization itself) provides a prime example of how his ideology of freedom without outward constraints trumped everything else. Even as the American ambassador to France, where he was able to see the atrocities and excesses of the French Revolution firsthand, he minimized and excused the bloodbath, believing that the violence was justified, if regrettable, because it served the higher good of the cause. In this case, the cause was ostensibly liberty (more accurately, it was vengeance), but this morally shifting rationale was no different than the fanatical devotion later employed by Marxist and Fascist revolutionaries during the 19th and 20th centuries. Jefferson lacked the philosophical balance of men like Adams and Washington, who saw liberty flourishing only within the carefully prescribed confines of law and order.

Mr. Ellis' book includes an appendix, detailing the arguments for and against a charge that has dogged Jefferson biographers for two centuries: The allegation that Jefferson fathered several children by one of his slaves, Sally Hemmings. The accusation first publicly surfaced when James Callender, a partisan hatchet-man formerly employed by Jefferson to savage the reputations of his political opponents, suddenly betrayed Jefferson, and wrote a lurid account of the plantation owner's ongoing affair with his own slave. There is no record of Jefferson ever publicly responding to the charge. Mr. Ellis, based on his analysis of Jefferson's almost spiritual view of women, concluded that the charges were probably false. But Mr. Ellis had the misfortune of publishing his book in 1996, only a year before DNA tests confirmed that Jefferson was almost certainly the father of Sally's children. Tucked away in my copy of American Sphinx (I bought it at a used bookstore) is a letter Mr. Ellis wrote to the New Yorker in 1999, after the magazine published an article on Jefferson's secret life. "I used to think that Jefferson was living a paradox," Mr. Ellis wrote, referring to Jefferson's capacity for massive self-deception. "Now I think he was living a lie."

On the whole, American Sphinx is not the stinging indictment of Jefferson that this book review has turned out to be. Obviously, Jefferson is by far my least favorite of all the Founders. If you read such respected and well-researched works as Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow, John Adams by David McCullough, and Joseph Ellis' American Sphinx, Founding Brothers, and His Excellency, Jefferson will probably become your least favorite Founder as well.