At a 1962 White House dinner honoring Nobel Prize winners, President Kennedy remarked, “This is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.” The witticism is apt, yet we might wonder if Jefferson ever dined alone. So large and varied were his accomplishments and failings, and so profound his contradictions, he might appear to us as a whole community of geniuses and devils rather than a single man. The title of a major 1996 biography, American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson, by Joseph Ellis, reflects the challenge. Although Jefferson’s capacious inner and outer life is as well documented as anyone’s from the revolutionary era, he remains a mystery.

“MOST BLESSED OF THE PATRIARCHS”: THOMAS JEFFERSON AND THE EMPIRE OF THE IMAGINATION by Annette Gordon-Reed and Peter S. Onuf Liveright, 400 pp., $27.95

In their new book ‘Most Blessed of the Patriarchs’: Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of the Imagination, Annette Gordon-Reed and Peter S. Onuf, two of the most eminent living Jefferson scholars, take their turn trying to answer the riddle. Their method is to investigate Jefferson from the inside out. Rather than reviewing the well-known facts of his political and personal life, they explore Jefferson’s sense of himself and his place in the world. And they are willing to accept that this self-conception may be a tangled, complicated one, quoting the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa’s maxim that “each of us is several, is many, is a profusion of selves.”

The key to Jefferson’s paradoxes, they argue, is that he gradually came to see himself as a “republican patriarch.” He reconciled his commitment to equality with his sense of personal superiority and desire for control by dividing life into two spheres, public and private. In the public sphere, he thought of himself as a citizen among equal citizens, while in the home he considered himself a benevolent patriarch—a home which, in the case of Monticello, included not only children, grandchildren, in-laws, and servants, but also several dozen slaves. (It would have included a wife as well, but Martha Wayles Jefferson died young, and he never remarried.) The title of the book comes from a 1793 letter in which Jefferson says that if his second daughter marries as happily as his first, “I shall imagine myself as blessed as the most blessed of the patriarchs.” Unlike the Biblical patriarchs, however, Jefferson sought not only to be a benevolent master of his family and their slaves, but also to be a citizen, that is, an equal member of a democratic republic.



Most Blessed of the Patriarchs is not a biography in the usual sense. It is arranged thematically rather than chronologically. Each chapter examines one force—“Virginia,” “Politics,” and “Music,” for example—that shaped Jefferson’s philosophy of life, and traces how it influenced his self-understanding and his journey from youth to old age. Jefferson’s conception of himself as a “republican patriarch” is seen as the center of his unbelievably diverse interests and endeavors. Much of the fascination of the book is that, in a relatively short span, it examines Jefferson not only as statesman and plantation owner, but also as philosopher, scientist, author, musician, inventor, architect, educator, father, and friend.

Although Gordon-Reed and Onuf look at Jefferson’s life as a whole, the center of gravity in their study is the topic that has perplexed observers since the eighteenth century: Jefferson and slavery. What does it mean that the man who drafted the Declaration of Independence, and who came very near to capture and probable execution as wartime governor of Virginia fighting for popular sovereignty, was also a slave owner? He was one of the most radical American revolutionaries, yet as Gordon-Reed and Onuf put it, “What has fascinated (and annoyed) many observers of the man, from his time until well into our own, is that he would dare to launch himself into this role from such an improbable base of operations: a slave plantation.”