Thomas Jefferson
by R. B. Bernstein
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Book Summary Information
Author: R. B. BernsteinEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2005-09-15
ISBN: 0195181301
Number of pages: 253
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Book Reviews of Thomas Jefferson
Book Review: The Power of Ideals
Summary: 5 Stars
This is the first book that I've read about Jefferson, my knowledge of this Founding Father to date having come from high school and college courses and an occasional newspaper article. This compact, well-written biography makes for a compelling read and, for me, clearly whetted my appetite to find out more about what made this oratorically-challenged man of ideals tick.
The portrait painted of Jefferson is an interesting, occasionally troubling one, that of a man somewhat thin-skinned, who would suffer what he considered fools in silence rather than open his mouth, who didn't have (in today's vernacular) "the fire in the belly" for politics and trembled while delivering his inaugural address, and whose conduct with two married women was at best questionable. He was a man who could trot out the theory of nullification when affronted by a politically-charged Federalist edict (The Alien and Sedition Acts), a brilliant diplomat who never quite learned how to temper his correspondence and paid for it, a man whose political philosophy ran so deep that it ended up robbing him temporarily of a friendship with another Founder, and one who built his legacy around the common man but bristled at what the common man was doing to shine the light of liberty in Paris simply because he was so personally and deeply grounded in the Virginia countryside.
Then, of course, there are the conflicting acts and views that Jefferson took with regard to race. He stated that "All men are created equal", yet expounded upon what he saw as the inherent differences between two races that could never be reconciled within the same republic. His relations with Sally Hemings appear to extend from his view of her as property. As part of the Territorial Ordinance, he proposed, unsuccessfully, that all lands won from Britain in the Revolutionary War be off-limits to slavery, yet according to Bernstein, during the debate on The Missouri Compromise argued forcefully against that accommodation in terms of the sovereign powers of the individual states, "...each of which would regulate its own affairs, including the decisions whether to accept or reject slavery in joining the Union, or to preserve or abolish slavery thereafter."
Bernstein's work is a riveting read about America's greatest Founding Father, the one who gave the most eloquent voice to the colonists' hopes and dreams, who unlike some of his contemporaries clearly saw the American experiment as something to be exported, and who, through several of his acts as president, set in motion a seemingly endless debate about the meaning of The Constitution and when and how it should be interpreted as America grows and changes.
Bernstein's "Thomas Jefferson" is not the last word on the author of The Declaration, but it is a wonderful place to begin.
Summary of Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson designed his own tombstone, describing himself simply as "Author of the Declaration of Independence and of the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, and Father of the University of Virginia." It is in this simple epitaph that R.B. Bernstein finds the key to this enigmatic Founder--not as a great political figure, but as leader of "a revolution of ideas that would make the world over again."In Thomas Jefferson, Bernstein offers the definitive short biography of this revered American--the first concise life in six decades. Bernstein deftly synthesizes the massive scholarship on his subject into a swift, insightful, evenhanded account. Here are all of Jefferson's triumphs, contradictions, and failings, from his luxurious (and debt-burdened) life as a Virginia gentleman to his passionate belief in democracy, from his tortured defense of slavery to his relationship with Sally Hemings. Jefferson was indeed multifaceted--an architect, inventor, writer, diplomat, propagandist, planter, party leader--and Bernstein explores all these roles even as he illuminates Jefferson's central place in the American enlightenment, that "revolution of ideas" that did so much to create the nation we know today. Together with the less well-remembered points in Jefferson's thinking--the nature of the Union, his vision of who was entitled to citizenship, his dread of debt (both personal and national)--they form the heart of this lively biography.
In this marvel of compression and comprehension, we see Jefferson more clearly than in the massive studies of earlier generations. More important, we see, in Jefferson's visionary ideas, the birth of the nation's grand sense of purpose.
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