In " 'Most Blessed of the Patriarchs': Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of the Imagination,'' Gordon-Reed and her coauthor, Peter S. Onuf, a professor emeritus of history at the University of Virginia, seek to reassess Jefferson's legacy, given all the recent discoveries about his long-buried private life. Eager to avoid the reductive thinking that has led some critics to dismiss Jefferson as a hypocrite, they aim to capture all sides of this highly compartmentalized man through a close examination of all he wrote and said. But while Gordon-Reed and Onuf "take Jefferson at his word about his beliefs, goals and motivations . . . [they do not] always endorse Jefferson's formulations."

Thomas Jefferson repeatedly insisted that the private lives of America's founders should be off limits to historians. In 1817, when a writer asked him about his family, the author of the Declaration of Independence coughed up little information, noting that personal matters "would produce fatigue and disgust to . . . readers." For generations, scholars agreed and most studies of our third president and his contemporaries focused largely on their political careers. But that taboo started to crumble about a half century ago. And thanks to the pioneering work of Harvard Law School professor Annette Gordon-Reed, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning "The Hemingses of Monticello'' (2008), we can now readily understand why Jefferson lived in such mortal fear of biographers. As she documented, the widowed Jefferson engaged in a long-term sexual relationship with Sally Hemings, an enslaved woman, and fathered six children with her.


Rather than offering the stuff of conventional biography, the authors profile Jefferson by devoting chapters to his views on key concepts such as "Home," "Plantation," and "Politics." Not surprisingly, they keep returning to his central contradiction — that one of history's most articulate enemies of tyranny owned hundreds of slaves, including his mistress, over whom he held dominion. As Gordon-Reed and Onuf note, early in his career, Jefferson expressed an interest in abolishing slavery. But during his stint as an ambassador in Paris in the late 1780s — as he began sleeping with the teenage Hemings — he suddenly stopped viewing this ugly institution as a direct threat to the American experiment. By 1793, Jefferson was advocating only small tweaks — such as incorporating slaves into plantations where they would become part of the patriarch's "family." That fall, shortly before returning to private life after serving as George Washington's secretary of state, he wrote, "I have my house to build, my fields to form, and to watch for the happiness of those who labor for me." Jefferson would now be satisfied with being a good slave master.

Jefferson's ideas about patriarchy were central to his political philosophy, as he saw the family as the microcosm of the nation. For Jefferson, as Gordon-Reed and Onuf write, "family governance and the government of the whole nation were inextricably linked." But his republican faith, as they point out, was based on some degree of self-deception. After all, Jefferson was a better father of his nation — in his reelection bid in 1804, he won by a staggering 45 points — than he was to his two daughters, Martha (Patsy) and Mary (Polly).


While the authors acknowledge that Jefferson was not quite the model parent that he professed to be, they tend to gloss over his severe emotional and interpersonal difficulties, which have led numerous writers to suggest that he may suffered from some chronic mental illness such as social phobia. For example, Gordon-Reed and Onuf flatly reject the idea that Jefferson's refusal to hire a French nanny, which would have enabled the girls to live with him in Paris, constituted neglect, as has often been argued. "Yet there is another way to view his situation," they write. "Jefferson may have experienced the absence of his daughters as a sacrifice as he eagerly awaited their vacations from [the convent school, where they ended up]." While this interpretation may well be the one that Jefferson used to justify his behavior to himself, it appears to be a bit of a stretch. Throughout his life, the painfully shy Jefferson, who had such a fear of appearing in public that he gave just two speeches during his entire presidency, would struggle to attend to the daily demands of parenting. This self-absorbed patriarch was rarely attuned to the psychological needs of any of the other members of his "family" — black or white.


Two centuries after his death, Jefferson the visionary leader and thinker is still worth emulating. But we can easily find better models for our personal conduct.

"MOST BLESSED OF THE PATRIARCHS'':

Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of the Imagination

By Annette Gordon-Reed and Peter S. Onuf,

Norton, 400 pp., $27.95

Joshua Kendall is the author of "First Dads: Parenting and Politics From George Washington to Barack Obama," which will be released next month.