Onuf's book, The Mind of Thomas Jefferson, an attempt to explain fully the contradictory Jefferson. Onuf acknowledges various “tensions” in Jefferson’s writings that are recognizable on account of a twisted personal life—viz., his express avowals of the abomination of slavery and of the inferiority of Blacks, as well as a 38-year on-the-quiet relationship with slave Sally Hemings.
Onuf’s Jefferson is a man, riven by amaranthine tension between self-constructed dichotomies—e.g., white versus black, private versus public worlds, male versus female—all products of “adolescent conflicts.” Onuf constructs a protean Jefferson—a Jefferson that is everything to everyone and ever inaccessible because, he says, the numerous and inconsistent images were carefully constructed by Jefferson himself through his correspondence. “Letter writing defined the parameters of Jefferson’s world. He assumed different voices in performing different roles as a correspondent…. Historians who look for disclosures of an authentic self behind these many voices and roles will be frustrated. Jefferson’s self is in his writing, and his fundamental commitments to equality, consent, and civility inform all his varied self-representations.” When we penetrate beyond the different voices of Jefferson and look for an authentic self, there is none. The passage is a serious misreading of Peterson’s argument in The Jefferson Image in the American Mind.
Onuf’s Jefferson, prodigiously out of touch with any conception of a true self, is a self-deceptive chameleon. It follows that the approaches to Jeffersonian scholarship today can be as protean as is Jefferson. He is literally a man for all times and for all persons, and so anyone, it seems, can have something substantive to say about such a plastic, inaccessible figure.
Onuf next turns to a discussion of Jeffersonian statecraft, where he brings home the point of Jefferson’s hypocrisy once again by references to his “contradictions.” Citing the critical work of James Sterling Young and Michael Lienesch, Onuf blames Jefferson for largely creating the sort of party animosities against which he railed all his life. Also along the lines of partisanship, Onuf castigates Jefferson and Jeffersonians for their “imaginary network of conspirators against liberty,” as if the gripes Jefferson had with Adams, for instance, apropos of the Alien and Sedition Acts were the result of sciamachy.
Jefferson and his minions “traded in empty words; self-effacement disguised vaulting (or sordid) ambitions.” Jefferson was a man of sordid ambitions and moral failings. “If Jefferson could not acknowledge his true motives or moral lapses, most conspicuously as a slave owner, that simply makes him more of a monster of self-deception.” Onuf, of course, assumes the antecedent of the conditional claim is true, and so the consequent is true—i.e., that Jefferson is a monster of self-deception.
The real issue for Onuf is sanctimonious reverence for Jefferson on the part of apologists. Jefferson has become a “synecdoche” for America. “Treatments of Jefferson that make him a god, standing or fallen, or ask him to stand for the entire nation, necessarily distort his human qualities,” writes Onuf. “Only in fiction should a person’s character and emotional attributes be asked to bear the whole weight of the narrative. The most successful of the recent studies of Jefferson are those that have best uncoupled not Jefferson and his pedestal but the man and the nation. Jefferson’s proper contest is not the array of gods and demigods in the American pantheon, but, rather, the social and intellectual milieu that shaped him—and within which he acted.”
Who are, for Onuf, the most successful recent scholars, who have knocked Jefferson off his pedestal?
It comes as no surprise to find Burstein and Gordon-Reed as the most prominent scholars. Onuf refers to the early books of Burstein, a former student, and Gordon-Reed, a close friend, whose 1997 book on Jefferson and Hemings he and Jan Lewis pushed through University of Virginia Press. He adds, “Each give [sic] us what might be called ‘possible’ Jeffersons.” In The Inner Jefferson, Burstein gives a depiction of Jefferson in “a mental and felt world of books and correspondents,” while Gordon-Reed gives a depiction of “an embodied world of masters and slaves.” Why are these possible Jeffersons? The Jeffersons constructed like the rest of us. He is not in the pantheon of gods.
Thus far, Onuf’s agenda seems plausible. Historians ought not to hyperbolize.
There is a second imbroglio. To create possible Jeffersons is merely to create not-impossible Jeffersons—following the logical equivalency of the claims p is possible and p is not necessarily false—and that allows for a wild array of depictions. Burstein’s Jefferson differs profoundly from Gordon-Reed’s. Is that inconsistency a matter for scholarly remorse? Onuf thinks it is not. “The proliferation of possible Jeffersons does not constitute the failure of the biographical enterprise. We would suggest, rather, the opposite. The search for a single definitive, ‘real’ Jefferson is a fool’s errand, setting us off on a hopeless search for the kind of ‘knowledge’ that even (or especially) eludes sophisticated moderns in their encounters with each other—and themselves.” And so, only those who are, like Onuf, postmoderns can approach Jefferson as historians.
Onuf continues. “If, in this age of full disclosure and true con-fessions, we are increasingly reluctant to rush to judgment on questions of character, how can we expect historians and biographers to explain to us an intensely private man who has been dead more than a century and a half?” We cannot, he asserts, but the public’s clamoring for the character of Jefferson and a moral assessment of it is a “form of compensation for the dim recognition that we are doomed to cluelessness in our own world, like Plato’s cave, a domain of shadows and hand-me-down light.” In short, scholars who search for “Jefferson’s inner self, the true him … a core coherent self” will find suffer failure and find frustration.
Among the possible Jeffersons, most are vilifications. He says much of the narratives of Pauline Meier and Joseph Ellis. Maier’s Jefferson is a “gifted turner of phrases.” Ellis calls Jefferson “a thinking man’s racist.” Onuf’s Jefferson, as we have seen, is “a monster of self-deception.
Yet Onuf’s postmodernist narrative is, after all, another possible Jefferson, a fictive story like all other created Jeffersons. That, of course, would be no botheration to Onuf qua postmodernist. Historians, like musicians and painters, are chiefly in the business of entertaining or pleasing others through what they have created.
The problem with that reply is that Onuf’s book is critical—really a book on postmodernist historiography—not entertaining fiction. He is throughout telling us how to do Jeffersonian scholarship and that seems untoward. Fictive narrative is not supposed to be normative. Moreover, Onuf’s prose is aggressive, often angry, and that comes across especially when he criticizes Ken Burns for not including him in Burns’ televised narrative on Jefferson. We can bury Jefferson, but we cannot praise him. It is strange that a book that promises readers insight into Jefferson persona—it is, after all, titled The Mind of Thomas Jefferson—we wind up learning only that Jeffersonian scholarship is a “fool’s errand.”
Enjoy fast, FREE delivery, exclusive deals and award-winning movies & TV shows with Prime
Try Prime
and start saving today with Fast, FREE Delivery
Loading your book clubs
There was a problem loading your book clubs. Please try again.
Not in a club? Learn more
Join or create book clubs
Choose books together
Track your books
Bring your club to Amazon Book Clubs, start a new book club and invite your friends to join, or find a club that’s right for you for free.
Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required. Learn more
Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.
Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.
Flip to back Flip to front
Follow the Author
Something went wrong. Please try your request again later.
Book recommendations, author interviews, editors' picks, and more. Read it now
Customers who bought this item also bought
Page 1 of 1 Start overPage 1 of 1
About the author
Follow authors to get new release updates, plus improved recommendations.
