Most Blessed of the Patriarchs

Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of the Imagination

Bibliographic Data

ID7309121
AuthorsBrian Steele (0000-0002-0081-1079, University of Alabama at Birmingham, corresponding author)
Year2017
Volume104
Issue2
Pages480-481
Publication date2017-06-22
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of American History (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0021-8723 • E-ISSN: 1945-2314
PublisherOxford University Press (OUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1093/jahist/jax197
OpenAlexW2748670229
LanguageEN
Citations received10

Annette Gordon-Reed and Peter S. Onuf, who have together (and separately) transformed our understanding of Thomas Jefferson as deeply as any scholars of the past generation, here offer us a Jefferson who “took his bearings from home when he imagined the nation's future” (p. 317). They go to great lengths to understand Jefferson's contexts so that readers can more easily identify with his project of self-fashioning, even as the authors find “the materials he had to work with” “profoundly alien to our sensibilities and moral sense” (pp. 316, 320). Hence, they organize the story around Jefferson's simultaneous projects of self-construction, homemaking (including the always-in-progress Monticello), and nation building—a story in which music and spiritual quest (each the subject of stunningly rich chapters) are at least as significant as constitutions and high finance (and perhaps more so). The title of the book is a somewhat-jarring intervention, taken from an at-first-glance playful, but, in Gordon-Reed and Onuf's reading, deeply revealing Jefferson reference to himself as the satisfied “patriarch” of a family, black and white, charged with paternalistic—and potentially autocratic—obligations more pleasing, he implied, than “the hated occupations of politics” that had been his prior burden. (Only one of the book's nine chapters explicitly attends to “politics,” ostensibly the central focus of Jefferson's long public life.) This image takes us immediately into a world where Jefferson was privileged as a kind of feudal lord—a reality at odds with his more typical projection as revolutionary republican. And, indeed, Gordon-Reed and Onuf are keenly aware of the profound difficulties of reconciling the republican with the patriarch. But by attending to the complex task of understanding “what Jefferson thought he was doing in the world,” they resist the temptation to overemphasize contradiction and paradox and instead deliver a Jefferson both sincerely pledged to the dismantling of tyranny and artificial hierarchy and holding an unwavering faith in the inevitability of human progress that allowed him to “rest easy” with conducting this revolution from a slave plantation on which he held arbitrary sway (pp. 316, xv

Aesthetics · Ancient history · Art · Art history · Autocracy · Democracy · Empire · Feudalism · Literature · Paternalism · Political science · Politics · Reading (process · Sociology · Subject (documents · White (mutation · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Classics · History · Law

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