Thomas Jefferson

Third president of the United States (1801–1809), coauthor of the Declaration of Independence, governor of Virginia during troublesome times (1779–1781), president of the American Philosophical Society (1797–1815), the mind behind the Louisiana Purchase (1803), and the sanguine “founding father” of the University of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson was undoubtedly an achiever. His stature as a public figure and an internationally renowned politician has produced an enthusiasm that, after almost two centuries since his death (on 4 July 1826), does not seem to waver. Both academics and the wider audience, regardless of their political orientation, are still eager to identify with this leader, or at least to extol his greatness and exemplarity. “If Jefferson was wrong,” has prophesized James Parton, a famous 19th-century biographer, “America is wrong. If America is right, Jefferson was right.” Jefferson’s prominence as a leader matches his achievements in the intellectual realm. Greatness must be bestowed on Jefferson also when we take him as a philosopher. A polymath spanning over a number of scientific disciplines as well as literature, art, classical languages, geographical explorations, architecture, and, of course, political science, Jefferson helped define the vocabulary of his days. Albeit not a systematic thinker, he delved extensively into numberless concepts, including human nature, virtue, happiness, nation, and government. While achievements and exemplarity are thus well attested, the scholarship underwent a dramatic turn in the early 1980s, when Jefferson the private man entered the scene. Scholars have begun questioning the characteristics of Jefferson as a model and a symbol hovering above historical time. They have stopped asking exclusively what Jefferson could mean to us, to civilization, and to future generations. More and more, this 18th-century man has emerged as trapped in a distant culture, ensnared in a far-off society far more complex than previous generations of scholars used to believe, and with which we cannot identify. Issues of inner life, anxiety, emotion, a romantic heart, gender, race, the dynamics of slavery, and many other aspects related to his mind have justly captured the attention. Increased specialization has splintered Jefferson the symbol into a myriad of fragments. Whether or not Jefferson was actually a sphinx, or a living contradiction, research has repeatedly shown that this real man—a Virginian slave owner, a hapless tobacco grower, a restless letter writer, an obsessive journal keeper, an aristocrat mansion dweller, and a romantic Enlightenment devotee—belonged to himself.