Va-Hist subscribers may find this review of a new biography of Thomas
Jefferson to be of interest.
 
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end of the review.
 
Brent Tarter
The Library of Virginia
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From: Ian Binnington, H-South [mailto:[log in to unmask]] 
Sent: Tuesday, September 21, 2004 12:10 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Crosspost: H-SHEAR Review, Egerton on Bernstein, _Thomas
Jefferson_


H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by [log in to unmask] (July, 2004)

R. B. Bernstein. _Thomas Jefferson_. New York: Oxford University Press,
2003. xviii + 253 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $26.00
(cloth), ISBN 0-19-516911-5.

Reviewed for H-SHEAR by Douglas R. Egerton, Department of History, Le
Moyne College.

Jefferson Reduced, Redux

"Take care of me when dead," Thomas Jefferson famously asked of his old
friend and protege James Madison. He need not have bothered.  Scarcely a
week goes by that does not see the publication of a new book on the
third
president, typically with the word "and" following his surname.  A check
of amazon.com reveals 21,930 references to Jefferson on their site,
roughly three times the number of references accorded to his French
contemporary Napoleon Bonaparte. Even John Adams, who has been
discovered
anew by the reading public, fails to draw the flock of authors and
scholars who circle about Jefferson, digging into every minuscule aspect
of his long life.

R. B. Bernstein, a Professor of Law at New York Law School and the
author
of several books on early American legal and constitutional history, has
produced a balanced and readable short biography of Jefferson.  Given
Jefferson's voluminous correspondence--which will be completely
published
only after most readers of this review are in their graves--as well as
the
daunting number of specialized studies that any potential biographer
would
have to master, this is no simple task. But Bernstein comes close to
pulling it off. Unlike Willard Sterne Randall's clumsy _Thomas
Jefferson:
A Life_, which devotes far too much space to Jefferson's early years and
then races through his presidential career, Bernstein understands
proportion, and each turn of Jefferson's varied life receives a nearly
equal amount of attention. One assumes that the target readership for
this
volume is college students, since David McCullough and Ron Chernow have
demonstrated that the general public will wade through ponderous tomes.
Students will indeed profit from Bernstein's brief but clear
explanations
of long, complicated events, such as the Jay Treaty, or the coming of
the
Revolution.[1]

More impressive still, Bernstein has fashioned what is probably the most
fair and evenhanded account of Jefferson's life. Unlike Dumas Malone and
Merrill Peterson, who came to praise Jefferson, or Joseph Ellis, who
came
to bury him, Bernstein steers a middle course, admiring Jefferson when
the
occasion deserves, but taking him to task for his frequently obtuse
behavior. Echoing Forrest McDonald, for example, Bernstein makes no
attempt to defend the Embargo Act of 1807. "Unfortunately," he writes,
"Jefferson's hopes were out of touch with the reality of the situation"
(p. 167). Worse yet, the Apostle of Liberty's use of the armed forces to
patrol American waters in search of smugglers "violated cherished
political principles, some of which Jefferson had given memorable
expression" (p. 168). For Malone, Jefferson could do no wrong, but
Bernstein reminds his readers that Jefferson had once accused King
George
III of using unwarranted military force in times of peace to enforce his
trade regulations, yet by 1808 he was committing the same crime against
his countrymen.[2]

As good as this book frequently is, one nonetheless has to wonder why
yet
another Jefferson biography is necessary. The promotional release from
Oxford University Press describes Bernstein's study as "the first
concise
biography" of the Virginian "in six decades," but that is hardly true.
The
work under review contains 198 pages of text, which is only 6 pages more
than Norman Risjord's 1994 biography, and but 10 pages less than Joyce
Appleby's 2003 biography. Both Risjord and Appleby are veteran scholars
of
the era, and the former has been writing about Jefferson's world since
_The Old Republicans_ was published in 1965. Noble Cunningham's 1987
biography and Joseph Ellis's 1997 character study weigh in at roughly
twice this size, but both are quick and enjoyable reads; Ellis is
especially student-friendly. (This does not even include other modestly
sized specialized works, such as Andrew Burstein's thoughtful _The Inner
Jefferson_ or Forrest McDonald's insightful if caustic _Presidency of
Thomas Jefferson_.) Even if Bernstein's work can stand beside these
studies, do we really need three "concise" biographies in ten short
years?[3]

There is also the question of whether one can write a concise but
complete
biography of such a multifaceted man and such a turbulent time. One
might
reasonably reduce the convoluted series of events that culminated in the
Louisiana Purchase into a single chapter, but can the story truly be
told
in seven pages? Bernstein's ability to condense lengthy monographs into
a
single paragraph is admittedly impressive, but some topics defy brief
descriptions. Over the course of his eighty-three years, Jefferson was
involved in so many critical events, wrote so many highly quotable
letters
and documents, and resided in so many turbulent places.  This is not a
plea for more oversized biographies. In the past few years, able
scholars
like John K. Alexander, Joel H. Silbey, and Lynn Hudson Parsons have
crafted modestly sized but highly successful biographies of Samuel
Adams,
Martin Van Buren, and John Quincy Adams. But even the well-traveled
Adams
lacked Jefferson's breadth of interests, and Adams's lengthy political
and
diplomatic career, for all of his successes, covered a far less
tumultuous
era. Quite possibly, Jefferson is the one founding father whose life and
times simply cannot be reduced to eighty-three thousand words.[4]

Curiously, it is in the area of race and slavery, the very part of
Jefferson's life willfully ignored by earlier biographers like Peterson,
Malone and Randall, where Bernstein is on the shakiest footing. None of
his errors are major, yet as Bernstein is rightly determined not to
gloss
over Jefferson's greatest personal failure, it is strange that so many
mistakes exist. St. George Tucker's eminently feasible plan for
uncompensated gradual emancipation, laid out in his 1796 _A Dissertation
on Slavery_, was not based on the idea that the "United States would buy
and free all the slaves" (p. 114), and Jefferson noted that retaining
slavery was like grasping a "wolf by the ear," not by the "ears" (p.
xi),
a small point until one realizes what a tenuous grasp one has in holding
a
snarling animal by a single ear. Rather more seriously, Toussaint
Louverture did not spell his adoptive surname with an apostrophe, Haiti
did not become an independent republic in 1801, and the French colony of
Saint Domingue did not encompass the entire island "now known as
Hispaniola" (p. 146). Hispaniola was the sixteenth-century name given to
the island by Spanish explorers, and French colonists inhabited only the
western half of the island, which they shared with the Spanish colony of
Santo Domingo in the east.

That said, for those in search of a serviceable biography to assign in
American history survey courses, or junior-level classes on the
Revolution
or early national period, Bernstein's work should be the one. His prose
is
clear, strong and thankfully free of jargon, and his brief
bibliographical
essay is up to date and will lead students to both the longer life
studies
and the handful of indispensable monographs that anyone interested in
Jefferson will wish to consult. Unlike most brief biographies,
Bernstein's, thankfully, does include notes; unhappily, Oxford placed
them
at the end of the book.

Notes

[1]. Willard Sterne Randall, _Thomas Jefferson: A Life_ (New York: Henry
Holt & Company, 1993); David McCullough, _John Adams_ (New York: Simon &
Schuster, 2001); Ron Chernow, _Alexander Hamilton_ (New York: Penguin
Press, 2004).

[2]. Dumas Malone, _Jefferson and His Time_. 6 vols. (Boston: Little,
Brown, 1948-1981); Merrill D. Peterson, _Thomas Jefferson and the New
Nation: a Biography_ (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970); Joseph
J.
Ellis, _American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson_ (New York:
Alfred A. Knopf, 1997); Forrest McDonald, _The Presidency of Thomas
Jefferson_ (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1976).

[3]. Norman K. Risjord, _Thomas Jefferson_ (Madison: Madison House
1994);
Joyce Appleby, _Thomas Jefferson_ (New York: Times Books, 2003); Noble
E.
Cunningham, _In Pursuit of Reason: The Life of Thomas Jefferson_ (Baton
Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987); Andrew Burstein, _The
Inner Jefferson: Portrait of a Grieving Optimist_ (Charlottesville:
University Press of Virginia, 1995).

[4]. John K. Alexander, _Samuel Adams: America's Revolutionary
Politician_
(Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002); Joel H. Silbey, Martin Van Buren
and
the Emergence of American Popular Politics (Lanham: Rowman &
Littlefield,
2002); Lynn Hudson Parsons, John Quincy Adams (Madison: Madison House,
1998).


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