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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Possibly Definitive?,
By
This review is from: Slavery and the Founders: Race and Liberty in the Age of Jefferson (Paperback)
Unlike most historians who consider slavery as an unfortunate sidebar to the ideological and political foundations of America, Finkelman boldy places slavery at the center of America's founding. Beginning with the Constitutional Convention of 1787 and continuing through to Jefferson's Declaration of Independence, his views on race and slavery, and his relationship to a woman enslaved to him (Sally Hemings), Finkelman makes a very valid argument that the "traditional" political leadership of the Jeffersonian era was perpetually - not occasionally - in debate about the issue of slavery, with most of those leaders falling on the pro-slavery side of the argument. The real value of the book is Finkelman's two chapters on Jefferson, whose political influence and opinion where nearly as revered by his peers as they are by contemporary early American historians. While noted historians such as Dumas Malone, Joseph Ellis, and Merrill Peterson have stretched the bounds of interpretation of the few seemingly anti-slavery comments Jefferson made or wrote in order to cast him as the unfortunate victim of an institution which he disliked, Finkelman is one of the first to put all of Jefferson's views on slavery and race - the few that seem anti-slavery, the majority that are anti-black, all of which are contradictory - together in one place, IN THEIR PROPER CONTEXT, up for public scrutiny. For anyone wanting an approach to understanding Jefferson's true views on slavery - based on the historical evidence - this is the book to start and, for now, end with. I didn't give it five stars because its focus is kind of narrow, but that could be because Finkelman has done such a great job of narrowing his focus and successfully arguing his understanding of "Race and Liberty in the Age of Jefferson."
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A contradiction that still stands,
By
This review is from: Slavery and the Founders: Race and Liberty in the Age of Jefferson (Paperback)
Paul Finkelman's dissection of constitutional sociology is fascinating on many counts. If we are to keep to the "original intent" of the US Constitution, as so many conservatives insist, then slavery should still be legal. That it is not shows that the Constitution was never meant to be engraved in stone by divine fingers of fire, but a document that changes with the needs of those whom it serves. The "original intent" school, is, however, right in one thing: the document was designed as a political compromise between the ideals of liberty and common humanity, and the very real injustices and inequities of the social system to which it was applied. It is to protect these inherited inequities that the original intenders wrap them in constitutional law. Mr. Finkelman demonstrates here that they are on solid historic ground for doing so.
In his take on Thomas Jefferson we see personified the personal contradictions expressed in the Constitution itself: how can a man so radical for liberty be a slaveholder? Yet this paradox is not so strange, and is in fact with us still. How can President Obama, for instance, speak of change while featherbedding vested corporate interests? Ending a disastrous war policy by continuing its "surge?" The ideal has always given way to the practical and expedient. The hypocrisy may be worthy of censure but only with great caution, for it lies in everyone at all times.
6 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Thomas Jefferson, slave master, slave trader,
By John C. Landon "nemonemini" (New York City) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Slavery and the Founders: Race and Liberty in the Age of Jefferson (Hardcover)
Biographers of Jefferson and historians of the American Revolution have a dilemma, resulting in the inspirational dayglow treatment of their subject. Why should should anyone in pursuit of the facts have a dilemma, the facts speak for themselves? This is an invaluable portrait in greyer hues and contains the delete button data in its two chapters on Jefferson beside a detailed and very interesting history of the slavery debate in the period of the Constitution. Since Jefferson was a man of his time and yet also a man in an extraordinary time almost out of time, the paradox finds what we might expect, a man blocked and buffered in a semi-conscious state of contradiction. Skip Nietzsche, here's the dull reality: in a strange way the realization Jefferson was 'multi-phrenic' rescues Jeckyll here. Yet this makes Jefferson interesting in a different way, in a very useful book (that won't make the bestseller lists). Good piece, fascinating. Ironically rescued Jefferson from my nervous disbelief in many yankee doodle treatments. Makes him fascinating all over again.
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