Politics and the misadventures of Thomas Jefferson's modern reputation: a review essay.

Jefferson's Demons: Portrait of a Restless Mind. By Michael Knox Beran. (New York and other cities: Free Press, c. 2003. Pp. xxii, 265. $25.00, ISBN 0-7432-3279-8.)

Thomas Jefferson. By R. B. Bernstein. (New York and other cities: Oxford University Press, c. 2003. Pp. xviii, 254. Paper, $13.95, ISBN 0-19-518130-1; cloth, $26.00, ISBN 0-19-516911-5.)

Jefferson's Secrets: Death and Desire at Monticello. By Andrew Burstein. (New York: Basic Books, c. 2005. Pp. xiv, 351. Paper, $15.95, ISBN 0-465-00813-5; cloth, $25.00, ISBN 0-465-00812-7.)

Adams vs. Jefferson: The Tumultuous Election of 1800. By John Ferling. Pivotal Moments in American History. (New York and other cities: Oxford University Press, 2004. Pp. xxii, 260. Paper, $14.95, ISBN 0-19-518906-X; cloth, $26.00, ISBN 0-19-516771-6.)

"Negro President": Jefferson and the Slave Power. By Garry Wills. (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2003. Pp. xiv, 274. $25.00, ISBN 0-618-34398-9.) (1)

AMERICAN POLITICAL CULTURE POSSESSES FEW HISTORICAL SYMBOLS DEPLOYED more commonly than Thomas Jefferson. Though he probably falls just behind George Washington and Abraham Lincoln in terms of sheer depth and volume of public reverence--the Jefferson Memorial in Washington is quite a bit farther afield for tourists than are the shrines to Washington and Lincoln--Jefferson outdistances all comers in the area of political utility as measured by the number and diversity of groups linking his legacy to their cause. Over the centuries, Jefferson has been invoked by the promoters of every cause from segregation to socialism, feminism to Third World revolution, and this diversity continues unabated. A quick perusal of the local bookstores turns up both a left-wing tome inserting the name Jefferson where Jesus usually goes in a popular bumper-sticker message and a business advice book, with Jefferson on the cover, purporting to edify busy executives on the Founding Fathers' secret insights into modern issues of personnel management and office "teamwork." (2)

While Washington serves as our literal national icon--the embodiment of the American state--Jefferson plays a more difficult role as the repository for our national political values. This is the substance of early Jefferson biographer James Parton's frequently quoted remark, "If Jefferson was wrong, America is wrong. If America is right, Jefferson was right." While a very flexible construct, Jefferson as a symbol has been most closely associated with the American institutions and values that tend to be summarized and packaged for export under the heading "democracy": popular elections, egalitarianism, religious tolerance, and freedom of expression, as practiced in vibrant local communities full of informed, active, peaceful citizens. The trajectory of Jefferson's reputation tends to track with the relative health of democratic politics, and that link goes a long way toward explaining why recent years have not been the most Jeffersonian of times in American culture or American historiography. (3)

A brief outbreak of public debate over "Jeffersonian Democracy" in 2003 revealed that the Jefferson political symbol was in crisis. When the Bush administration's plans for the democratization of the Middle East were being debated prior to the invasion of Iraq, the adjective "Jeffersonian" was almost unconsciously appended to describe the type of democracies such a program would seek to achieve. (4) On one level this made perfect sense: Jefferson's accession to power by open, peaceful, electoral means, against the concerted resistance of a sitting government, made the United States one of the world's first examples of the type of democratic system that advocates of American intervention abroad have long claimed to champion. As R. B. Bernstein points out in one of the books under review, 1800-1801 was the first time in world history that a republic saw power switch hands from one party to another and remained a republic. (5)

Yet during the 2003 debate, the term quickly became almost self-refuting, conjuring up political visions that came more from Frank Capra movies and antique genre paintings than from reality in either the early republic or the present. The transplantation of folksy town meetings and string-tied stump speakers to the deserts of Iraq seemed patently ridiculous. Even the administration officials who were most starry-eyed about the possibility that "regime change" in Iraq would set off a democratic revolution across the Middle East quickly dissociated themselves from the goal of imposing "Jeffersonian democracy" once it began to be bandied in the press. "That's used to put the whole thing down," complained Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz. (6) Diehard defenders of Iraqi democratization tried to make their goals seem more plausible by demeaning Jeffersonian democracy itself: "People say it's not clear if the Middle East can achieve Jeffersonian democracy," conservative think-tank scholar Patrick Clawson told a reporter, "but I say Jeffersonian democracy [involved slave ownership], and it was another 140 years before women got the vote." Clawson completed the thought on the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer: "I think that Iraq will do better than that." (7)

Wolfowitz and Clawson perhaps unintentionally gave voice to a view of Jefferson and his eponymous democracy that is strongly reflected in the current literature on early American political history, including most of the books under review. In the work of many recent historians, the essence of Jeffersonian democracy is found not in the political movements that originally promoted it but instead in the life and thought of Thomas Jefferson himself, as illustrated with quotations from Notes on the State of Virginia and Jefferson's most famous letters. In stark contrast to an older story of Jefferson as the leader of a democratic revolution, historians have given readers a cloistered rural intellectual who hoped that America could long remain a prosperous agricultural backwater and a proudly southern politico whose cant about liberty and democracy masked a deep devotion to protecting his region's parochial interests, including slavery. Even Andrew Burstein, one of the more Jefferson-friendly of the authors under review here, essentially endorses this view: "Jefferson's political identity could not be separated from his desire to protect and sustain the cultural and economic power of the South" (Burstein, 129). For Garry Wills and the historians whose work he draws on most heavily, Jefferson was a "Negro President" whose career was predicated on "protection and extension of the slave power," the South's malignant and (it is claimed) largely successful exploitation of the constitutional system (Wills, 226). (8)

This problematic intellectual move loses sight of what Jefferson actually meant to his contemporaries. The movement and party Jefferson headed were steeped in Enlightenment liberalism and democratic radicalism. A party with a southern and western base whose most crucial battles for national power were won in the working-class wards of Philadelphia and New York, the Democratic-Republicans embraced Thomas Paine and William Godwin along with Jefferson and looked forward to rapid social progress and the extirpation of superstition, injustice, social privilege, and political despotism under the influence of reason and truth. They denounced human slavery in all forms and promoted such causes as separation of church and state, public education, abolition of imprisonment for debt, and legal reform. (9) While feminism was not on the political radar of most Democratic-Republicans, their sympathizers included a number of female radicals and other politically engaged women, including historian Mercy Otis Warren, agitator Fanny Wright, the actress, novelist, and playwright Susanna Haswell Rowson, and a coterie of "fiery Frenchified dames" in 1790s Philadelphia. (10)

As important as it is to remember that Democratic-Republicans drew support from far beyond the ranks of southern slaveholders, John Ferling, very much the odd-man-out of the authors under consideration here, reminds readers that Jefferson himself was widely credited with inspiring all this, whatever the nature of his private views or his failures regarding slavery. As Ferling puts it, Jefferson "outlined a vision of an attainable new world that was free of privilege and tyranny.... [T]he great majority of those who were alive in 1826 recognized Jefferson's achievements in breaking many of the fetters that had existed before 1776" (Ferling, 211).

Certainly Jefferson's followers saw him in these terms during his lifetime, when songs and portraits and toasts and giant cheese wheels celebrated him as the People's Friend and "The Man of the People ... the advocate of political and religious liberty, the friend of toleration and of man." (11) With "The SUN of democratic truth" shining, declared a Poughkeepsie, New York, writer in 1803, "The friends to the rights of man have the supreme consolation, and its enemies, the corroding mortification, to KNOW that the resplendent glory of JEFFERSON shall shine the lauded theme of nations, notwithstanding the efforts of his unjust foes." (12) "What Washington fought for is still kept in mind, /And by Jefferson render'd a joy to mankind," a poet chimed in. (13) Jefferson's biography and personal life were certainly discussed, often in terms of his dislike of "ostentatious ceremonies, which are the appendages of European courts," his adherence to "republican simplicity," and his accessibility to visitors. However, a Newburgh, New York, toaster expressed well the widespread sense that Jefferson's egalitarian ideas and democratic politics were the primary reasons to love him: "The Declaration of Independence is the best eulogium of his character, & will remain an everlasting testimony of his real worth." (14) Love was the word that Democratic-Republicans tended to use, as in a lengthy litany published in the Trenton (N.J.) True American, each paragraph beginning "I love Mr. Jefferson, because...." (15)

Historians who purport to explain Jefferson's significance without reference to democracy miss the point, or at least a major one, of his legacy. Yet, with the exception of Ferling's study and recent volumes written very much against the prevalent grain by Joyce Appleby and Sean Wilentz, that is the tendency that has been on display over the past two decades. (16)

The works at hand cannot be properly assessed without some consideration of how Jefferson's historical standing has arrived at its current low state. Because of the weight his legacy has to bear, Jefferson has continually been the subject of political controversy and periodic reinterpretation, to a much greater degree than almost any other figure from the founding era.

The Sage of Monticello probably reached the apogee of his cultural reputation during the mid-century heyday of New Deal liberalism. Raised on the fighting popular histories of Claude G. Bowers, a Democratic politician and an editorialist for the Democratic New York World, New Deal Democrats embraced Jefferson as their political ancestor and adopted a Bowers-shaped view of American politics as a struggle between democracy and aristocracy or crypto-monarchy, the "economic royalists" as Franklin Delano Roosevelt would put it later. Bowers's Jefferson and Hamilton: The Struggle for Democracy in America (1925) was the only book that Roosevelt ever reviewed, and he showed his indebtedness to the Bowers version of Jefferson not only in his rhetoric but also by creating the Tidal Basin memorial to Jefferson (along with the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial in St. Louis), slapping Jefferson and his home on the U.S. nickel, and appointing Bowers to an ambassadorship. The same period and similar influences saw Jefferson's home Monticello restored and made into a showcase museum that actually surpassed the building's former glory and attracted thousands of tourists each year. (17)

FDR and his speechwriters had to finesse the contrast between their heavy federal interventions in the economy and the states' rights/small government stereotype of Jeffersonianism that the Democratic Party had long promoted. The authorization was provided by Jefferson's famous dictum "that the earth belongs in usufruct to the living" and his frequently expressed belief that future generations should be free to order society in the way that they saw fit according to their own understanding of conditions. "[W]hile economic changes of a century have changed the necessary methods of government action," Roosevelt argued, "the principles of that action are still wholly" Jeffersonian. (18) The substance of those principles was treated vaguely, but they boiled down to the social happiness, open equally to all, that Jefferson's public statements said a good government existed to protect. The New Dealers were aided in their re-purposing of Jefferson by a handful of scholars, including historian Charles M. Wiltse. His 1935 study, The Jeffersonian Tradition in American Democracy, downplayed the value of stale Jeffersonian "doctrine" and highlighted Jefferson's arguments for social limitations on the accumulation of property (exemplified by his opposition to primogeniture and entail) and his selective but still notable willingness to subordinate property rights and economic interests to higher moral and national purposes. (19)

In this version of Jefferson, a 1785 letter to James Madison declaring "the earth is given as a common stock for man to labor and live on," flatly contradicting 1920s capitalist orthodoxy, became an important text. Writing in shock after viewing the condition of common laborers in France, Jefferson suggested that governments should do whatever they could to ensure a wide distribution of property, including a proposal for what we would call progressive taxation. The fight to appropriate property for oneself was legitimate only for the social and moral reason that property holding encouraged "industry." If property became concentrated in too few hands, he warned, "the fundamental right to labor the earth returns to the unemployed." (20)

With this "new Jefferson" in mind, other Democratic leaders followed FDR's lead, for the Jeffersonian heritage proved an effective (though often challenged) way to bridge the gap that was opening between the typically northern New Deal liberals who were coming to dominate the Democratic Party and the southern conservatives who had owned it since the Civil War. As R. B. Bernstein points out, Harry S Truman, a transitional figure in the transformation of the party, initiated the federal "program to put the primary sources of the history of American democracy within the reach of every American ..." (Bernstein, 193-94). The primary model and an early beneficiary of this program was Julian P. Boyd and Princeton University's project to create a totally comprehensive published edition of Thomas Jefferson's papers. Truman's directive to the National Historical Publications and Records Commission was sparked by receiving and admiring Boyd's first volume. (21)

John F. Kennedy did an especially effective job of updating Jefferson for the 1960s. Kennedy invoked him as the avatar of religious liberty to defuse fears of a Catholic president and as the Sage of Monticello in cold war-driven efforts to celebrate the "free world" and the U.S. government as greater forces for intellectual and cultural achievement than the communists. Kennedy famously remarked to guests at a 1962 White House dinner honoring Nobel prize winners that it was "the most extraordinary collection of talent and of human knowledge that has ever been gathered together at the White House--with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone." (22)

Kennedy's deployment of Jefferson as the first of the best and brightest played somewhat unfortunately into an image of the Democratic Party that was almost as old as U.S. party politics itself. From the very beginning of Jefferson's career in national partisan politics, which can be dated to his public exposure as an opponent of Alexander Hamilton's policies in 1792, Jefferson's enemies assailed him with the charge that his seeming democratic radicalism was grounded in nothing more substantial than the idle musings and "visionary, wild and speculative systems" of an aristocratic dilettante. His ideas were depicted as completely at odds with both the reality of his own slave-supported life and the dictates of mature and responsible national leadership. Federalist pamphleteers tried to turn Jefferson's reputation as a philosopher and scientist against him, making Jefferson into the original model of American conservatives' favorite target, the effete liberal elitist whose squishy-soft political sympathies revealed a naivete of thought and cowardice of character that rendered him totally unfit for office. (23)

South Carolina Federalist William Loughton Smith laid out the basic line of attack in pamphlets written, with probable input from Alexander Hamilton, for the 1792 and 1796 elections: "The characteristic traits of a philosopher, when he turns politician, are, timidity, whimsicalness, a disposition to reason from certain principles, and not from the true nature of man; a proneness to predicate all his measures on certain abstract theories, formed in the recess of his cabinet, and not on the existing state of things and circumstances; ... a wavering of disposition when great and sudden emergencies demand promptness of decision and energy of action." (24) As ideological opponents of democracy struggling to find ways of appealing to the common voter, Federalists campaigning against Jefferson often played the anti-intellectualism card. Federalist wits loved to imagine scenes of Jefferson absorbed in frivolous homemade science experiments, "busily engaged in impaling a butterfly" or trying to extract sunbeams from cucumbers while important men waited. It pointed up what Federalists saw as the effeminizing contrast between the civilian Jefferson and military veterans like Washington and Hamilton: "It should seem that the active, anxious and responsible station of president would illy suit the calm, retired and exploring views of a natural philosopher, his merits might entitle him to the professorship of a college, but they would be as incompatible with the duties of the presidency as with the command of the Western army." (25)

The Federalists' favorite concrete evidence of Jefferson's "timidity" and "wavering" was the often-embroidered tale of Jefferson cravenly abandoning his post as Virginia's governor during the British invasion of the state in 1781. (26) Andrew Burstein gives an excellent account of Jefferson's need to continue fighting this charge even after the end of his presidency, when a particularly damning and inaccurate version appeared in General Henry "Light Horse Harry" Lee's 1812 memoirs. When Jefferson was still a candidate, the charge was sometimes put in strikingly modern form. At "the Appearance of some black Cloud or a sudden Clap of Thunder," one Federalist newspaper opined, "we may expect Mr. Jefferson to cut and run as usual." (27)

The anti-intellectual lampoons of Jefferson contained the message that he was only a pretended "friend of the people" and that he really held the common-sense values of ordinary people and more serious men (like Hamilton and Washington) in contempt. This went along with a much shriller, darker tone the Federalists took when their thoughts turned to Jefferson's sympathy with the French Revolution. Adopting what was already becoming a standard reactionary line against a wide variety of reformers, radicals, and revolutionaries, Federalists suggested that Jefferson's airily optimistic sayings about liberty, equality, and democracy masked a secret lust for tyrannical power and an appetite for mass violence, while his calls for religious tolerance were said to obscure his true goal of destroying the Christian religion and the traditional family, for good measure. "[Y]ou will find these pretenders to philosophy" like Jefferson "coolly justifying the most atrocious and sanguinary cruelties, provided they are means to a certain favorite end," wrote William Loughton Smith in 1796. (28) A few years later, once the Federalists had actually lost major elections to Jefferson and his Republicans, the level of hysteria had become much higher. Connecticut's Theodore Dwight warned that a Republican victory in his devout state would mean "the ties of marriage ... destroyed; our wives, and our daughters ... thrown into the stews;.... a world full of ignorance, impurity, and guilt; ... without worship, without a prayer, without a God!" (29)

These lines of attack on the Democratic-Republicans largely died out once Jefferson retired from office and the party was known simply as the Democrats. (30) A century and a half later, the slurs returned with a vengeance and much more success. The elegantly well spoken Adlai Stevenson was tweaked as an "egghead" during his campaigns against Dwight D. Eisenhower, and beginning in 1964 and 1968, the Republicans implemented a "southern strategy" that eventually stole the mantle of populism and much of its traditional electoral base from the Democrats in the name of a supposedly silent majority angered by the social changes that liberal policies had helped wreak. Though the process occurred in stages broken up by occasional Democratic resurgences, William Jennings Bryan's old "Jeffersonian" base in the South and rural Midwest had been thoroughly Republicanized by the early twenty-first century, and the words "liberal Democrat" had become synonymous for many white Americans with arrogant elitism if not evil incarnate. (31)

These developments alone did not doom Jefferson as a political icon, for conservatives had long contested radical and liberal claims to the Jeffersonian legacy. The Jefferson who idealized Virginia society and extolled the political and social virtues of southern rural life, who sharply cut federal taxes and expenditures and feared a "consolidated" government, provided plenty of evidence to support such an interpretation.

A political development far more damaging to Jefferson within the academy was the New Left's challenge to the limitations of cold war liberalism. Not only Democratic liberals but also Republican ones (who still existed in those days) had little difficulty synthesizing their support for black civil rights and social equality with their admiration for Jefferson and the democratic traditions he symbolized. The civil rights movement was seen as the long-delayed completion of a revolution that Jefferson had begun. The early 1960s student left did not necessarily disagree. The Port Huron Statement quoted the Declaration of Independence even while expressing discontent with how well Jefferson's goal had been realized; Tom Hayden, leader of Students for a Democratic Society, cited "Jefferson's attitudes on liberty" as a major influence. (32) Campus protests and the Vietnam War put the liberals who ran most universities and the U.S. government in the 1960s at odds with campus radicals and their fellow travelers, who came to reserve their most intense scorn for older liberals like Vice President Hubert Humphrey--"a shallow, contemptible, and hopelessly dishonest old hack," according to counterculture journalist Hunter S. Thompson--despite the fact that men like Humphrey were early supporters and longtime defenders of most of the New Left's social causes. (33)

Frustrated by the continuation of the Vietnam War in the face of mass protests, the democratic idealists of the New Left inevitably made their strongest stand, at the 1968 Democratic convention, against the party that had room for antiwar views. According to David Farber, one of the sharpest scholarly historians of 1960s politics, the New Left activists went to Chicago not to influence or reform Jefferson's party but instead to show their "disrespect to the convention itself and to the political system that could perpetrate Vietnam and perpetuate racism and inequality.... They didn't accept party politics.... they didn't accept the idea that electoral politics represented democratic practice." Ironically, their vague consensus-based alternative, "participatory democracy," was partly modeled on their idea of "Jefferson's vision of yeoman democracy," even though Jefferson was one of the primary founders of American party politics. (34)

The New Left's rejection of electoral politics was even more intense in the more radical, group-specific liberation movements, including women's liberation, Black Power, and their many offshoots and imitators, that spun out of the student movement and civil rights. These movements took the New Left's own tendencies--its personalism, hostility to traditional institutions, and fractious revolutionary fundamentalism (the competition over whose revolutionary commitments were most pure and radical)--and extended them so far as to condemn the New Left itself. The New Left always privileged the radicalization of individual consciousness as the highest form of politics, but the new movements went much further and located the most fundamental political struggles in the intimate aspects of daily life. The white male activists who ran SDS and the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam had a soft spot for Jeffersonian democracy and a return to an imagined early America of face-to-face communities, but adding race, gender, and sexuality to the mix forced a deeper rejection of American tradition that left little room for Jefferson the political icon or most other white male leaders (including the old guard of the radical leadership). (35)

From the perspective of the 1960s liberation movements, the mere freedom to participate in elections and use public facilities did nothing to address the deeper inequities and injustices that were rooted in the very structure of western patriarchal society. It seemed a cruel joke to use the word democracy to describe a society in which poor people, women, and racial minorities were still effectively subjugated.

One need not join the right-wing crusade against "tenured radicals" to take note of the tremendous influence these trends had on American historians generally and historiographic assessments of Thomas Jefferson and Jeffersonian politics in particular. Trends in political historiography had placed Jefferson in some jeopardy even before the 1960s really took hold. Early in the decade, social scientific political historians turned to behaviorist analyses of voting that had little use for Jeffersonian ideals or the fragmentary election returns of Jefferson's era. Beginning in the late 1960s a New Left-influenced social history arose, one that was seriously committed to recovering the lives and viewpoints of ordinary Americans and was armed with a wider array of sources and more sophisticated notions of race, gender, and class than American historians had ever employed before. Since most of the new social history's subjects were completely excluded from formal political participation, political history in any form came to seem elitist and reactionary. Historians still wrote about political struggles, but their protagonists became radical abolitionists, slaves, female reformers, and labor activists, leaders of social movements rather than conventional politicians, who tended to appear as villains if they showed up at all. Long after New Left feminists and radicals (including Tom Hayden and many other movement veterans) had embraced electoral politics in the 1970s--in fact, just as this was happening--historians of early America were consolidating a New Left-influenced rejection of parties and elections, as subjects and as meaningful forms of democracy, that would last through the end of the century. (36)

Though an older generation of scholars continued to publish on Jefferson in their accustomed mode and though he certainly cropped up in debates over revolutionary political theory and political culture, an odor of antiquity increasingly emanated from conventional, politically oriented takes on the Sage of Monticello. Or worse: As historians built a more honest assessment of slavery and plantation life in the Old South, the liberationist sentiments carved on FDR's Jefferson Memorial began to seem woefully inadequate at best and downright mendacious at worst.

R. B. Bernstein gives a good short account of this "more critical stage in the history of Jefferson's reputation." The change was aided, "ironically, by the fruits of the documentary editing revolution launched by The Papers of Thomas Jefferson" (Bernstein, 194). Winthrop D. Jordan's widely read 1968 study White over Black situated Jefferson's racial ideas within the context of a seemingly ineffable but continually metastasizing racism deeply embedded in Anglo-American culture. Jordan also noticed (for the first time, Bernstein claims) that all of the known children of Sally Hemings, the enslaved maid of Jefferson's daughter, were born nine months after the master of Monticello was at home. This observation was probably the single most damning piece of evidence that Jefferson fathered the children of his slave that anyone adduced before DNA testings Bernstein cites a recent statistical study that "concluded that the odds against anyone but Jefferson being the father were ten thousand to one" (Bernstein, 196).

The Hemings scandal, which previous generations of Jefferson scholars had worked so hard to dismiss or ignore, gained powerful credence just as the wider culture was disposed to take a greater interest in racism, slavery, and the debunking of patriotic views of American history. Though not all of the writing on Jefferson and slavery that came out in this period was bitterly hostile--novelists even seemed inclined to posit Jefferson's relations with Hemings as a forbidden love affair rather than an abuse of power--Sally Hemings did become the centerpiece of the Jefferson story and (based on the present writer's teaching experience) the aspect of Jefferson's biography most widely known among the general public. When combined with the rejection of political history and electoral democracy, the new developments considerably narrowed Thomas Jefferson as a historical figure. No longer the democratic radical and social reformer whose slaveholding private life was tragically at odds with his public career, Jefferson was increasingly defined according to his personal status as a slaveholder. (38)

This remained true even in works that dealt extensively with Jefferson's political ideas. Interpretations of Jefferson emerging from the "republican synthesis" of the 1970s and 1980s backburnered slavery as an issue; however, the version of Jefferson they presented might fairly be characterized as a rural reactionary whose thoughts and aims rarely strayed from an idealized version of Virginia and then only as far as the equally elitist universes of the English Country party or the Renaissance civic humanists. The former keynote ideas of democracy, equality, and tolerance were replaced by backward-looking fears that the forces of economic modernity might corrupt a virtuous rural republic. (39) Joyce Appleby mounted a powerful counterattack against this conservative, "classical republican" interpretation of Jefferson, but while Appleby and others succeeded in damaging the hegemony of the republican synthesis, probably irreparably, they were unable to save Jefferson for all but the most confirmed Jeffersonians. (40)

As the republicanism versus liberalism debate wound down, a new trend emerged when certain political and constitutional historians sought to bring slavery to the foreground in their fields, not just in the Civil War era, where the slavery issue was unavoidable, but also in the era of Jefferson and the Founders, where slavery had been given relatively little consideration as a major political factor. (41) Here the leader was legal historian Paul Finkelman, who in 1992, at a Charlottesville conference commemorating Jefferson's 250th birthday, shocked many in the audience with a no-holds-barred prosecutor's brief against Jefferson's record on the subject of slavery. Finkelman emphasized Jefferson's failure to back up his putative antislavery views with any significant actions and compared him unfavorably to other Founders who were less vocal regarding the rights of man but who took a more substantive stand against slavery by freeing their own slaves (as George Washington did in his will) or joining an antislavery organization (like John Jay and Alexander Hamilton). In the years since Finkelman launched his broadside, a portrait has quickly emerged across many different historical subfields of Jefferson as not only a rural reactionary but also a hypocritical zealot and the intellectual godfather of scientific racism, secessionism, Indian removal, and other detestable ideas. (42)

While Finkelman cannot be blamed for the vagaries of Irish public intellectuals, the most forward position in the new anti-Jeffersonian historiography of the 1990s was undoubtedly occupied by Conor Cruise O'Brien, whose book and Atlantic Monthly article in 1996 aimed frankly at getting Jefferson jackhammered off Mount Rushmore and sanded off the nickels. "In the multiracial American future Jefferson will not be thought of as the Sage of Monticello," the article' s tagline intoned. "His flaws are beyond redemption. The sound you hear is the crashing of a reputation." (43)

O'Brien fixated on the so-called Adam and Eve letter, in which Jefferson infamously counseled a friend not to reject the French Revolution because of its violence: "My own affections have been deeply wounded by some of the martyrs to this cause, but rather than it should have failed, I would have seen half the earth desolated. Were there but an Adam & an Eve left in every country, & left free, it would be better than as it now is." This letter was written before the Reign of Terror and is not reflected in any of Jefferson's actions--on becoming president, he allowed his opponents to keep not only their lives and property (contrary to their expectations in many cases) but also often their government jobs. Yet like the Federalists before him, O'Brien detected in Jefferson the unforgivable spirit of a blood-soaked communard, "in the grip of a fanatical cult" "intoxicated with" "the wild gas' of liberty." In a neat bit of political triangulation that also dated back to William Loughton Smith's pamphlets, O'Brien matched his attack on Jefferson as a wild-eyed leftist with an assault on his racial views, tweaking "liberal Jeffersonians" by linking Jefferson to the Ku Klux Klan. More peculiar to O'Brien was an effort to pin the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing on a "Jeffersonian inspiration," because Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols liked Jefferson's line regarding Shays' Rebellion (from another letter that bothered O'Brien), "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants." McVeigh was even wearing a T-shirt bearing that statement! (44)

In O'Brien's mind, this seemed to far outweigh the well-documented role of extreme fundamentalist Christianity in the "Christian Patriot" militia culture out of which McVeigh and Nichols came. (45) Of all historical figures from the founding era, only Jefferson, the "American Synecdoche," has been made to bear the sins of untold later generations, as though he invented racial oppression and political violence by failing to act against them as vigorously as America's democratic, egalitarian, liberationist ideals--the ones he popularized--suggest he should have. Jefferson's error, it seems, was being too eloquent and public in promoting those ideals in the first place, a problem from which many of his colleagues among the Founders, including George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, and the post-1776 John Adams, did not suffer.

More subtle than Finkelman or O'Brien's writings was what might be called the "Founder Studies" movement, a wave of books ruminating on the character, leadership, and culture of the Founders, individually and collectively, that began appearing in the late 1990s. Wildly popular in the new mega-bookstores sprouting up all over the country at the time, Founder Studies constituted a genteel, latte-sipping backlash against the post-1960s rejection of conventional political history. Scholars such as Joseph J. Ellis and Joanne B. Freeman and popular writers led by David McCullough often preened on the conceit that by returning to the "dead white guys" as subjects, they were bucking some oppressive, politically correct orthodoxy. (46) Ellis self-dramatizingly wrote that "a kind of electromagnetic field" surrounded the "entire subject" of the Founders,

   manifesting itself as a golden haze or halo for the vast majority
   of contemporary Americans, or as a contaminated radioactive cloud
   for a smaller but quite vocal group of critics unhappy with what
   America has become or how we have gotten there. Within the scholarly
   community in recent years, the main tendency has been to take the
   latter side, or to sidestep the controversy by ignoring mainstream
   politics altogether. Much of the best work has taken the form of a
   concerted effort to recover the lost voices from the revolutionary
   generation--the daily life of Mar[t]ha Ballard as she raised a
   family and practiced midwifery on the Maine frontier; the experience
   of Venture Smith, a former slave who sustained his memories of
   Africa and published a memoir based on them in 1798. This trend is
   so pronounced that any budding historian who announces that he or
   she wishes to focus on the political history of the early republic
   and its most prominent practitioners is generally regarded as having
   inadvertently confessed a form of intellectual bankruptcy. (47)

Thus, with a bit of rhetorical judo borrowed from contemporary conservative politics, a senior historian's best seller about some of the most famous men in American history was presented as an act of intellectual courage.

In one of the many ironies of this stance, the Founder Studies approach did not actually reject post-1960s historiography so much as apply some of its worst habits to the "dead white guys": the automatic privileging of personal life and personal relationships over other matters and a disdain for electoral democracy, political parties, and government policy as worthwhile subjects. Readers learned a great deal about personal rivalries, personality clashes, and the domestic lives of the Founders but could come away, especially from McCullough's and Freeman's books, knowing little about the issues the politicians were fighting over. McCullough lavished hundreds of pages on the marriage of John and Abigail Adams while covering critical incidents of the Adams presidency such as the Alien and Sedition Acts in a few paragraphs. Likewise, Freeman's account of "national politics" in the 1790s had almost nothing to say about the French Revolution or Hamilton's financial system, or the Jay Treaty, or religious freedom, or almost any other subject that was actually debated in those years. The personal angle rescued Founder Studies, or "Founders Chic" as it was called at the time, from the charge of hagiography while simultaneously making the chosen Founders even more relatable and heroic to modern readers: "By humanizing the Founders," Newsweek enthused, "McCullough and others have rescued them from the sterility of schoolbooks and, vividly and often movingly, showed them overcoming their fears and flaws" and creating "freedom" for future generations. (48)

The problem for Ellis and the others was discerning how to celebrate the leadership and character of familiar figures without coming off as reactionaries out to reverse decades of historiographic progress and take history back from the Martha Ballards and Venture Smiths. These authors wanted to distance themselves from the "golden haze" school of popular history, which was heavily promoted by conservative culture warriors looking for slights against their childhood heroes and greatly lacking in the sort of academic respectability that most of the Founder Studies writers wished to retain. (49)

They needed a foil, a dead white guy with whom they could contrast their chosen subjects. Thomas Jefferson's battered historical carcass turned out to be just the thing. With varying degrees of openness, Ellis and the others wanted to burnish the historical stature of supposedly underrated figures likes John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, and George Washington. The character-above-all approach also dovetailed nicely with trends in journalism and politics at the time, when a Republican Congress was impeaching a popular president for sexual peccadilloes and a compliant national media seemed eager for any political stories that did not involve policy. The media seized immediately on the connection and contrast that could be made between the image of the Founders as presented in these books and the Republican and media caricature then prevalent that sketched William Jefferson Clinton, A1 Gore, and the Democrats as inherently inauthentic and untrustworthy: "'Partly, it's a desire for authenticity,' McCullough told NEWSWEEK. In an age of media-obsessed, poll-driven politicians who cannot, it sometimes seems, make a speech or cast a vote without hiring a consultant, many Americans are nostalgic for an earlier era of genuine statesmen." (50)

As usual, the list of particulars against Jefferson's character was quite similar to the one developed by the Federalists in the 1790s. It can be summed up in Ellis's image of Jefferson as a "sphinx," inconsistent, elusive, slyly manipulative, and just not a very forthright or likable fellow. Though both Hamilton and Jefferson recruited followers, supported partisan newspapers, and launched attacks on each other, Jefferson's preference for working through surrogates and personal contacts was compared unfavorably to Hamilton's honest aggression, which included at various times publishing pamphlets about his own adultery and about his Federalist colleague John Adams's unfitness for office, in his personal life and values, Jefferson was depicted as a spendthrift and hypocrite. His Declaration of Independence and sponsorship of curbs on western slavery and the slave trade (and many other contributions to social reform and political liberation) were vitiated by his never-renounced personal involvement in slavery and his racist speculations in what was widely accepted in its time as a scientific work, Notes on the State of Virginia.

Largely dropping democratization or democracy as a theme, Founder Studies insistently read the politics of the period as a matter of elite personalities, strategies, and relationships. Both academic and popular historians lauded what they saw as the personal honesty and political prescience of figures like John Adams and Alexander Hamilton, sometimes straining to counterbalance their authoritarian, militaristic politics with suggestions that they held more progressive views than Jefferson on issues like slavery, race, and the role of women. Implicit in the scholarly versions of this view and loudly explicit in the best sellers on Adams and Hamilton was the argument that much of Thomas Jefferson's credit as a "Founding Father" and national symbol should be transferred to the Federalists. Given the privileging of character and personality over policy and ideology, Founder Studies thus threatened to turn the political history of the early republic into a sort of zero-sum popularity contest where some Founders' Q ratings went up while others' went down. (51)

Critics noticed that the Founders whose ratings were on the rise because of these histories were all the conservative figures of their day, that Founders Chic was really Federalist Chic. "Conservative" may or may not be the proper adjective, but the celebrated figures were those who resisted many of the socially and politically democratizing trends of their day in favor of policies that may have increased national security and pushed toward a modern economy but that also served the interests and protected the prerogatives of early America's established social, economic, and political elites. While reserving special opprobrium for Jefferson as a false or inadequate friend of liberty, democracy, and equality, the Founder Studies writers held up men who actively opposed those principles, preferring to dwell on the putatively greater likability and more mature, tough-minded, and responsible leadership they saw in Federalists like Hamilton and Adams.

In Hamilton's case, credit was transferred primarily by using the chief twenty-first-century yardsticks of national greatness--wealth and power--along with some fairly superficial efforts to turn Hamilton into a figure representing social tolerance and equal opportunity. Hamilton grew up poor in the West Indies and had to marry his way into money and New York's highest social circles; in recent writings he thus was a self-made man. Hamilton's membership in the New York Manumission Society earns him a rating of "staunch antislavery advocate" despite the fact that he never expended an ounce of his political capital on the issue at any time in his career. (52)

Slavery has been used in Founder Studies and other Federalist-oriented historiography as a litmus-test issue, the one point that outweighs all others. It is an anachronistic one as well, since the Federalist party repeatedly nominated slaveholder candidates and never actually proposed the abolition of slavery or even made it a partisan issue until their flirtations with New England secessionism after 1800. As Sean Wilentz has argued, addressing the recent fashion for positing "a broader Federalist antislavery humanitarianism--one that was egalitarian when compared to the glaring contradictions of the Republican slaveholders": "Rarely has any group of Americans done so little to deserve such praise." (53)

As a general characterization, Hamilton the bleeding-heart liberal holds very little water. His political record included favoring upward transfers of wealth, child labor, military repression of dissent, and retroactive changes in election laws that might have reversed the 1800 election results. Regarding the moral character of his personal life, one finds adultery, dueling, and personal finances almost as bad as Jefferson's. Nevertheless, the New-York Historical Society enshrined the compassionate-conservative take on Hamilton in a major exhibition whose marketing campaign towered over Central Park West: "Alexander Hamilton: The Man Who Made Modern America." As if! (54)

For all their supposed concern with Jefferson's failure to live up to his democratic beliefs, the basic elitism of Founder Studies showed in the way the books handled the politics of the era. To the small extent that Jeffersonian democracy (or any other kind) was addressed, the writers usually dismissed it, often by tendentiously linking it to slavery. Hence the resistance to the Alien and Sedition Acts, involving thousands of printers, writers, and readers defying the legislation and campaigning for the ouster of its authors, is typically reduced to Jefferson and Madison's Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions, themselves caricatured as little more than secessionist manifestoes that led directly to nullification and the Civil War. Ellis describes this as "the capstone of the Jefferson-Madison collaboration" in his chapter on their friendship. Rightly noting that the resolutions were a dismal failure, Ellis and many other writers show little awareness of the analytical lacuna left by treating the Republican response to the Alien and Sedition Acts as a matter of elite maneuvering: the popular politics that actually stopped their enforcement. (55)

The inversionist strain in Founder Studies, the tendency (also borrowed from the early "new" histories) to simply flip the heroes and villains in re-telling the old stories, receives perhaps its most ham-fisted workout in Garry Wills's "Negro President": Thomas Jefferson and the Slave Power. Wills draws his thesis that the Federalists were the real liberationists from recent historiography yet simultaneously imagines himself as pioneering the idea. While most of the Founder Studies books only implicitly pit their favored Founder against the others, Wills baldly sets Jefferson in one column and a chosen opponent, Federalist Timothy Pickering of Massachusetts, in the other and then proceeds point-by-point through their careers, transferring historical virtue credits from the Jefferson account to the Pickering one.

Timothy Pickering may well deserve better than historians have given him. Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick called him a "glowering hack" whose administrative positions were hampered by Captain Queeg-like obsessions "with details and trivia--spying out corruption, denouncing inefficiency, devising reforms," and seeking out enemies to scourge. Elkins and McKitrick's assessment seems right on the money as far as Picketing's personality and abilities go, but for other reasons he is uniquely a historical figure for our times. Picketing seems to have been genuinely unconventional in matters of race. He was not in any way a tolerant man--living as he did by his deacon father's motto to always be "sufficiently explicit in showing the people their sins"--but he was able to acknowledge the moral dimensions of the situation blacks and Indians faced and was unusually willing (as the founding generation went) to deal openly and on relatively equal diplomatic terms with them. (56) Wills makes much of what was undoubtedly Pickering's finest hour, the good relations and military aid he engineered (as secretary of state), against hard British and French pressure, with the government of slave rebel leader Toussaint Louverture in the former French colony of Saint Domingue.

As remarkable as this incident was, it would be wrong to conclude that Picketing or the Federalists were the real liberals or democrats in the politics of the 1790s. Picketing's dominant purpose was dismembering the remains of France's empire, leading up to what he hoped (against the wishes of his boss, President Adams) would be all-out war with France. Jefferson was horrified by Pickering's policy toward Saint Domingue, but Adams and Hamilton were not especially happy with it either. In fact, Adams's decision to seek peace with France (to which Pickering's vehement resistance eventually got him fired) virtually required consigning Toussaint and Saint Domingue to the tender mercies of Napoleon, who planned to reconquer the island and reimpose slavery. Thus the close relationship one might wish for between the first two American colonies to throw off European rule was probably never in the cards.

Far from seeking world liberation, Picketing was a harsh foe of the democratic movements in his own country, seeing Jacobin plots everywhere and making himself the J. Edgar Hoover of the 1790s in his zealous enforcement of the Sedition Act, a State Department duty and one Picketing began eagerly performing even before the law was officially approved. (57) Moreover, while Picketing did support abolition (even though abolition on Saint Domingue was a by-product of the hated French Revolution), neither he nor any of the other Federalists were after liberty or democracy for the island's population. They were not especially bothered by the fact that Toussaint's government was in effect a military dictatorship or that it was forcing many of the treed slaves to go back to work on the sugar and coffee plantations and even rehiring some of their old overseers. Nor did the Federalists seem to have an especially enlightened view of the freed slaves' capacity for self-government. Hamilton argued that "No regular system of Liberty will at present suit St. Domingo" and recommended something "partaking of the feudal system." While antislavery and racial tolerance played a role in his actions, Pickering's opening to Toussaint might as easily be seen as part of a less glorious American conservative tradition: military and economic support for dictators and military juntas in developing nations as long as they back the U.S. side in international politics. (58)

As earlier reviewers have noted, "Negro President" is a surprisingly slap-dash effort from such a distinguished writer. Much of the text reads like a lengthy discursive footnote; Wills takes potshots at obscure historians in the body of the text and repeatedly rants about the historical literature's alleged neglect of pet points. (59) Other sections are actually written in outline form. Wills admits that he had never heard of Pickering until just before writing the book (Wills, 227). Many readers will wish the prolific author had used his clout with publishers to write a more thorough book about a fascinating but forgotten figure rather than using Picketing as a club to beat Jefferson and adopting many of Pickering's grossly one-sided interpretations of early American history and politics. This is especially true given Wills's admission that "Pickering's contribution cannot be weighed in the same scale with that of" Jefferson and John Adams (Wills, 230). (Adams becomes a bit of a secondary target for Wills since he fired Picketing as secretary of state for gross insubordination. Wills strikes back by declaring Picketing a better father than Adams.) This line may say more than Wills intended about the bootlessness of Founder Studies, at least when character is the main focus. History would become an almost religious enterprise if its mission were really to compare the weights of various worthies on some cosmic scale. One hopes that most present-day historians did not sign on to become high priests of a moral temple.

"Negro President" also contains a number of small factual errors and innumerable cases of perverse arguments and tortured evidence. Trying to buff Pickering at Jefferson's expense in the category of frontier knowledge, Wills relocates Pennsylvania's Wyoming Valley, the present Wilkes-Barre/Scranton area in the northeastern section of the state, to "western Pennsylvania" and dismisses the Lewis and Clark expedition in a sentence (Wills, 25). Pickering did yeoman service trying to settle an old colonial dispute in which Connecticut had laid claim to a piece of the Pennsylvania interior, and he participated creditably in a number of negotiations with the eastern Indians. But forgetting to look at a map and note that almost the whole state of Virginia lies west of Wilkes-Barre and to remember Virginia's innumerable incursions into and over the Appalachians, Wills draws the wild conclusion that Pickering had a "long and close engagement" with the Old Northwest, while "Jefferson had none" (Wills, 25). That is, if you leave out the Northwest Ordinance, a career-long drive to secure U.S. control of the Mississippi River (ultimately leading to the Louisiana Purchase), and Jefferson's overwhelming political popularity in the West in all the national elections in which he stood.

Not content to rest with the relatively inarguable point that Jefferson should not get full credit for the antislavery provision of the Northwest Ordinance, Wills tries to award Picketing the points for another territorial slavery ban proposed in 1783 that never passed. When the idea was raised again, neither Pickering nor Jefferson was around, though the Declaration of Independence was invoked as a justification. There was still no Jefferson or Pickering on the scene when Congress finally passed the ban in the 1787 Northwest Ordinance, including neither of the opposing key details Wills emphasizes: Jefferson's proposals for a delay until 1800 and Pickering's for stronger enforcement measures. Relying on the work of Paul Finkelman, Wills then admits that none of it mattered anyway, because the settlers ignored the ban. Somehow this mishmash adds up in Wills's mind to Pickering's advantage.

In a similar fashion, Wills makes Pickering out to be a friend of the Indians, which he clearly believed he was, while naming Jefferson (somewhat accurately) as the father of the Indian removal policy that Andrew Jackson later implemented on a large scale. Unmentioned is the fact that, whatever Pickering thought, the larger purpose of his Indian negotiations was keeping the remnants of the Iroquois Confederacy out of a bloody war that President Washington's administration was fighting to subjugate the Indians of the Old Northwest. Jefferson certainly supported this war, too, though as secretary of state he had little involvement with it. Nevertheless, if one wanted to play the Founder Studies game, one could point out that Jefferson's own presidential administration included no major Indian wars and that in the form of the Lewis and Clark expedition he sent out the most high-profile and peacefully intended embassy the Indians ever received from the U.S. government. Of course, Jefferson the expansionist was certainly no true friend of the continent's indigenous population, but only on the moral balance sheets of Founder Studies history would that somehow make Timothy Picketing look better.

The major argument of "Negro President" was raised at the beginning of this essay. In essence, Wills adopts wholesale the position of Pickering, the Hartford Convention, and the Slave Power theorists of the late antebellum period that Jefferson, the Democrats, and the South stole New England's rightful hegemony over the American republic by foul means, specifically the extra "negro votes" the South received in its federal representation because of the infamous three-fifths clause of the Constitution. Reducing Jefferson's electoral vote by an amount proportional to the slave population of states he won in 1800 (twelve votes, according to Wills) produces the conclusion that "Negro votes made Mr. Jefferson president." Wills quotes New Englanders bitterly comparing the counting of slaves in the population to counting "New England horses, cows, and oxen" (Wills, 2-3).

There are difficulties with Wills's application of the Slave Power thesis to the election of 1800, though the argument has become commonplace among those who wish to treat Jefferson as simply a proslavery figure and 1800 as the Slave Power's first electoral triumph, "a great tipping point in American history" (Wills, 49). In evaluating this interpretation, we need to be clear that Wills and the Federalists' complaints about slavery's influence on the 1800 election do not really rest on moral objections to slavery. Instead, they are an attack on the democratic legitimacy of Jefferson's victory, an effort to contradict his claim that "a mighty wave of public opinion" had "rolled over" the country and thrown out the Federalists. (60) The hodgepodge of state procedures for selecting electors obviously casts a bit of doubt on Jefferson's claim; only five states actually chose electors by popular vote. Wills subtitles his chapter on the election of 1800 "The Negro-Burr Election." His grounds are that "other things being equal, the outcome was determined by" the twelve extra three-fifths-clause votes and Aaron Burr's legislative campaign in New York State (which Wills wrongly claims is "often overlooked") (Wills, 62). Democracy was perverted in 1800, Wills suggests, and even where a democratic election did occur, Aaron Burr should get the credit. Wills uses this observation to support Burr's and Pickering's convictions that some sort of Federalist-Burr deal to take the presidency from Jefferson in the electoral college would have been perfectly legitimate and even justified--if they had dared to face the "Twice fifty thousand swords" that a contemporary song threatened "would flame/ For Jefferson and Liberty." (61) Federalists later used the "negro vote" argument to claim, as defeated parties often do, that the people had not really rejected them.

The argument that the three-fifths clause perverted democracy and caused the wrong outcome in 1800 is just not true. As John Ferling points out, "Adams was not the only candidate who was injured by vote-manipulating plans" (Ferling, 168). Federalist Massachusetts, fearing the vociferous Republican parties in some of their larger towns, "rescinded popular voting" for 1800 (Ferling, 156).

More crucially for Jefferson, Federalists in the Pennsylvania state senate blocked any sort of presidential election in what everyone understood to be Jefferson's strongest northern state. Pushed by the country's most active and intense local Democratic-Republican organization, based in the working-class wards of Philadelphia, and the country's most widely read pro-Jefferson newspaper, the Philadelphia Aurora, Jefferson had carried Pennsylvania in 1796 in a popular election and was clearly poised to do it again in 1800. The Republicans had taken the state governor's office in a furious 1799 campaign, and "Republicans received nearly two-thirds of the votes cast in the [1800] state and congressional races" (Ferling, 168). Knowing that Adams would lose a popular presidential election in Pennsylvania, likely by a landslide, Federalists prevented the passage of the law necessary to organize the election and finally accepted a compromise split of the electoral vote eight to seven in favor of Jefferson, giving Adams as many as seven "extra" votes he would not have gotten if a fair election under the 1796 rules had been held. (62) William W. Freehling, Wills's source on the figure of twelve "negro votes," calculates a narrow sixty-three to sixty-one victory for Adams without the three-fifths clause (taking away twelve of Jefferson's seventy-five electoral votes and two of Adams's sixty-three). Eliminate the other major example of democracy's perversion in 1800, the non-election in Pennsylvania, and the electoral vote swings back to Jefferson, seventy to fifty-four. (63)

Wills, like the Federalists whose sour grapes complaints he passes on, is highly selective in his concern for democracy here. The Slave Power theft makes a better story for modern readers and historians prone to distrust electoral politics, but there are plenty of indications other than the fractured electoral college results that public opinion really had shifted, in the North as well as the South. The Republicans won sweeping victories in many state elections and their first majority in Congress in 1800. They did even better in 1802 and especially in 1804, when the "negro vote" complaints were made with particular bitterness but Jefferson won by a "negro vote"-proof landslide that even included much of New England.

The three-fifths clause presents a more complex question than the Slave Power thesis supposes. New England Federalists stressed the illegitimacy of granting representation to persons who "have no voice in the elections" and no political will of their own (Wills, 3). This was standard republican theory, but it did not really describe the practice of representation and apportionment in early America. Wives and children were considered to have no political will of their own and lacked many civil rights, and neither they nor resident non-citizens, nor in many places free blacks, felons, or propertyless men, had the fight to vote. Yet all were counted in the population for purposes of representation, and all were thus "represented" despite their lack of a formal political voice. As meaningless as it seems, this very insubstantial and paradoxical form of representation staved off complete civil dehumanization and could have important long-term political consequences. As Jan Lewis has pointed out, this became the basis of one of the woman suffrage movement's stronger arguments. An 1866 petition from Elizabeth Cady Stanton and others invoked the fact that the Constitution "counts us as whole persons in the basis for representation"--women were part of the constitutional system. (64)

Moreover, it is not clear that there were any logical alternatives to some form of slave representation in the Constitution or that the possibilities that existed would not have been worse, e.g., better for the Slave Power. As Wills admits, the "federal ratio" was originally devised as a way to apportion both representation and taxation. Since all agreed that taxation should be made in proportion to representation, a more logical and more lucrative solution than the three-fifths clause might have been counting slaves, like wives and children, as whole persons for purposes of representation.

"Negro President" and a number of the other books under consideration here seem to be artifacts of publishers' efforts, in the wake of the Ellis and McCullough best sellers, to meet the public's seemingly limitless appetite for Founder-pondering. In some cases, editors appear to have found the market so crowded that it was necessary to slap somewhat lurid titles on rather staid books.

So we have Jefferson's Demons, from Michael Knox Beran, a well-credentialed attorney who is also a National Review and Wall Street Journal contributor and earlier wrote a book on Robert F. Kennedy. Beran's languid, digressive work on Jefferson may lead some readers to the sad conclusion that an unfortunate side effect of the great documentary projects like Boyd's Papers of Thomas Jefferson has been allowing busy journalists and lawyers to imagine they can research and write profound tomes on the Founders in their spare time.

A devotee of pretentious displays of erudition on such favorite glossy magazine topics as wine, architecture, and European travel destinations, Beran moves through Jefferson's life chronologically, rifling digressively on people, places, and artifacts Jefferson encountered (and often going much farther afield than that). He enjoys spiking his prose with little Shakespearean and classical paraphrases and allusions that often have little to do with Jefferson but allow Beran to explain them lovingly in his densely packed endnotes. He also has a penchant for striking off florid little aphorisms that let the historian reader know he or she is not in Kansas anymore: "The qualities that make a magus are always enigmatic, and Jefferson's soul is as difficult to elucidate as any other great man's" (Beran, 199).

Beran's book is difficult to elucidate, but that does not necessarily make it great. His approach is much more that of a novelist or an old-fashioned literary critic in the Edmund Wilson mode, and he is far above having anything as vulgar as a thesis. His general mission seems to be performing the usual inversion routine on Jefferson. Beran wants to take Jefferson, the Enlightenment rationalist who clipped the miracles out of the Bible and urged John Adams not to take Socrates too literally when he mentioned "his Daemon" ("He was too wise to believe, and too honest to pretend that he had real and familiar converse with a superior and invisible being"), and make him into a kind of Tory mystic, the precise opposite of what Jefferson and all his associates thought he was. (65) "He loved to play the child of light, the rational illuminato, yet he drew on the very traditions he censured in order to tread out his own prophetic wine," Beran writes (Beran, 202).

There is certainly something to the notion of Jefferson as a sensitive artist. As Beran and several of the other authors under consideration point out, Jefferson's literary skills are what made his greatest achievements and his historical role possible. Beran has some nice passages on Jefferson as the "poet of liberty" (Beran, 139). Yet it does too much violence to a lifetime absorbed in scientific activities, technological experimentation, and rationalistic philosophy, mostly ignored by Beran but the artifacts of which filled up Monticello and covered its walls, to make the claim that "civilized mysticism" was what really made him tick (Beran, 203). (66) Beran's perspective seems to be that of a self-styled Burkean cultural conservative, eager to worship at the shrine of the great books and prone to sniffing at "the votaries of liberalism" for being allegedly "content to worship at the altar of progress" and taking "that dull fool for a god" (Beran, 203).

Lurking inside Jefferson's Demons is a potentially useful work on Jefferson's encounter with classical art and literature, or what he took from his travels in Europe, or even a much more tightly argued and better documented book about the mysticism that lay just beneath the surface of Enlightenment thought, only to emerge later as Gothic fiction and Romantic poetry. Instead Beran takes the showier and less convincing tack of explaining Jefferson's "soul" by expatiating on a tiny unnoticed detail of his life, in this case a bit of the decor in Monticello's parlor. The key bit for Beran is a "band of neoclassical vanilla ice cream" running along the top of the walls and above the doors and windows and under the mantel that Jefferson had decorated with classical motifs--skulls, axes, knives, bowls, jugs, and caps--drawn from Roman religious rituals involving animal sacrifice. Jefferson copied them from "books of engravings," but never mind, the inner soul of the man is revealed: "Jefferson--the man who believed that the tree of liberty could be kept fertile only through the shedding of blood--decorated his living room with the utensils of primitive slaughter" (Beran, 95-96). This supposedly connotes not only Jefferson's deep-down affinity for violence but also his kinship with ancient mysticism.

Then there are the demons of the title. Sadly these are not the cinematic kind that levitate objects and cause little girls to vomit green slime. Instead demon or daemon refers to a classical concept, which Beran also equates with the word genius, of "a spirit allotted to a man at birth, a sprite or a ghost that helped to determine the man's character and fortune." One learns from reading Beran carefully--and going back to Jefferson's writings he quotes--that "Daemonism" was a concept Jefferson used pejoratively to denote mistaken attributions of the human mind's own workings to supernatural sources (Beran, 99-100). This does not faze Beran, which is not too surprising coming from a writer who claims to be able to see into a man's soul through his living-room moldings.

Despite its prurient title, Andrew Burstein's Jefferson's Secrets is probably the most careful and thoughtful of the books under consideration here and is more sympathetic to Jefferson than the others. One of the most prolific scholars of his generation, Burstein began his career with The Inner Jefferson: Portrait of a Grieving Optimist, perhaps the last academic book that can be described as an appreciation of Jefferson. Although Burstein now refers to The Inner Jefferson as a study of "Jefferson's literary self-construction," it was to some degree a psychological study of Jefferson; while Burstein would probably reject the label of psychohistorian, the role of psychology and emotion in history has been a recurring theme in his work ever since (Burstein, 114). In particular, Burstein has tried to apply the concepts of sentimentality and sensibility, as developed in cultural history and literary studies, to figures and topics more commonly seen in political history. (67)

While somewhat miscellaneous in its structure, Burstein's latest work might be more accurately titled "Jefferson's Medicine Cabinet" rather than Jefferson's Secrets. Some of the chapters take up rather disparate subjects, such as Jefferson's favorite novels, but the heart of the book is a very convincing argument that Jefferson's language, attitudes, and actions are best understood in the context of the medical knowledge and vocabulary of his time. Eighteenth-century medicine was still closely connected with philosophy and operated on a heavily overlapping border between mind and spirit. Notions of the physical nervous system were mixed up with emotional states, beliefs, memories, and qualities of character. Burstein manages a rare feat in the Jefferson literature by actually adding something new. He explains that the peculiar bodily, vivid language Jefferson used to describe society and politics came from medicine: he constantly wrote of throes, convulsions, spasms, tremors, irritants, sense, and disease. (Burstein might have added blood to the list.)

Burstein finds in this medical language a key to Jefferson's political success. "Jeffersonian democracy was, from the beginning of Jefferson's career, a radical movement based on sympathy for the people at large." But sympathy meant not just emotional support but also a physiological phenomenon, the force that communicated sensations and impressions between the mind and body. Seen as sympathy, democracy was healthy and natural rather than dangerous. While the body politic was an old idea, Jefferson gave it a new dynamism by constantly speaking of the way such a body might take in new sensations, grow, and change, perhaps with a few convulsions along the way, and eventually return to health. While Jefferson always sought to restore his own body and the body politic to a calm and balanced state, his medical language helped envision change and struggle as the natural results of political youth and vigor: "Bigotry is the disease of ignorance, of morbid minds; enthusiasm of the free and buoyant" (Burstein, 53-54).

Considerably more shocking for most readers will be the way Burstein uses his medical view of Jefferson to offer a new perspective on the Sally Hemings question. Burstein's first book was burned a bit by the timing of the results of the DNA analysis of the possible link between Hemings and Jefferson. In the present volume, Burstein is apologetic over his earlier decision to side with the defense in the Jefferson-Hemings case, only a few years before that position was irreparably damaged by the tests. In Jefferson's Secrets, he tries to fashion an intelligible explanation for Jefferson's likely behavior that is reasonably consistent with his earlier interpretation.

Given Jefferson's racial views and the affectionate dynamics of his Enlightenment family, Burstein does not believe that he was likely to have been in the habit of forcibly raping slave girls or to have embarked on a love affair with a slave serving as substitute wife. Instead, Burstein argues, Jefferson may have periodically engaged in sex with Sally Hemings, "as a result of his medical conditioning, to preserve his health" (Burstein, 154-55). The medical authorities Jefferson consulted taught that sexual intercourse was necessary "in maintaining a healthy balance of the body's internal forces" as long as it was not engaged in too often. Too much sex or any masturbation "weakened the nerves over time and led to melancholy" because semen could not be fully replenished. "[T]he genital liquor" or "Essential Oil" "was thought to support one's nervous constitution" (Burstein, 157). Hemings's children were the results, in essence, of sex therapy. The medical angle helps explain for Burstein why Jefferson did not seem to feel much guilt over or see any need to explain the arrangement, and more importantly, why he would keep on fathering children with Hemings well into his old age, even after this fact had been exposed in a national scandal. The answer was, doctor's orders!

There is a distinct Dr. Strangelove quality to this portrait of an old man seeking sex with a nubile young woman for his health, but it has the ring of truth. It also seems like an explanation that, if it becomes widely known, will not have any very positive impact on Jefferson's already-dwindling historical fan base.

Though it does not represent a particular interpretation, R.B. Bernstein's short one-volume biography, Thomas Jefferson, fills a classroom need and for the most part covers the necessary ground in a smooth and judicious fashion. It does not try to turn back the historiographic clock and present a traditional Jefferson biography--modern historians' concerns with gender, race, culture, and the details of everyday life are addressed. What Bernstein's book does represent is an almost too faithful effort to reflect the recent historiography in a work that also has to deal substantively with Jefferson's political career and thought in a way that the Founder Studies books do not. In a number of passages a generalization made from the literature is offered but then followed by evidence from Bernstein's own research that does not necessarily support the generalization.

His account of the 1796 presidential election provides an example of this problem. Both political science--oriented scholars of electoral politics and proponents of the republican synthesis highlighted the danger of imposing anachronistic modern assumptions about parties and political behavior upon a generation that did not actually believe in the legitimacy of permanent parties or aggressive political competition. An older literature on the so-called first party system was chided and partially dismissed in the 1970s and 1980s for making too much of party machinery and party affiliations in a period when political parties as we know them barely existed even in nascent forms. (68) More recently Founder Studies scholar Joanne Freeman gave this general de-emphasis on parties and policy issues a thin anthropological gloss and amplified it into the claim that "national politics" in the early republic should be primarily defined as a kind of ritual combat in which eighteenth-century gentlemen vied for honor and reputation. (69) Dueling among politicians was the most convincing and emblematic example of this idea, though most politicians, including Jefferson, Madison, and Adams, never dueled.

Introducing the 1796 campaign, Bernstein deliberately echoes the Freeman interpretation with the comment that "Elections were contests about character and reputation as much as policy and party" (Bernstein, 114). Paradoxically, he then proceeds to describe a number of Federalist attacks on Jefferson that addressed policy issues and perceived voter preferences much as they would have in any campaign after parties took hold: that Jefferson wanted to abolish slavery (!), that he would be weak and cowardly in dealing with the French in what was then a serious war scare, that he was an atheist philosopher who posed a threat to Christianity, and that he did not share the values of ordinary Americans. If that was honor culture, then the Republicans and Democrats were still at it in the early twenty-first century. Bernstein would have been better off following his own evidence rather than incompatible interpretations from the literature.

In other cases Bernstein transmits and amplifies conclusions from the literature that are not well established. A minor theme in a handful of recent articles has been "Jefferson's less than enlightened view of women's abilities and his blunt reluctance to extend his democratic ideology to embrace women," a view that is also sometimes extended to his party (Bernstein, 194). The main basis of this interpretation with regard to Jefferson has been the somewhat condescending tone of many of his letters to women, especially his daughters, and a few critical comments he made about the behavior of women he encountered in Parisian salons. (On the other side of the ledger, Jefferson kept up a lengthy, respectful, and substantive correspondence with Abigail Adams that gets treated as the exception that proves the rule.) Bernstein reifies the notion of an ideologically sexist Jefferson to the point of suggesting that his hectoring "lectures" helped hound his sickly daughter Maria to her death (Bernstein, 108). The idea of a broader Democratic-Republican antifeminism gains support from the seemingly larger supply of politically outspoken women among Federalist wives and the famous case of the property-owning and Federalist-leaning single women, chiefly widows, in New Jersey who briefly had the franchise only to have it taken away by a Republican state government. (70)

The apparent intention of the "sexist Jefferson" claim is to tick off another box in the effort to undermine his liberationist credentials in the eyes of modern readers. As in the case of slavery, most of the other Founders who left extensive collections of their letters have the advantage of not having any democratic ideology to extend. The implicit suggestion that there was a body of opinion anywhere on the male political spectrum that favored women's voting or active political participation in Jefferson's day is ludicrous. The Federalists in New Jersey, who--in the face of rising Republican strength--tried to mobilize those single women who were enfranchised by the state's property requirement, never made a principled case for doing so, and no state under either Federalist or Democratic-Republican control ever contemplated extending the franchise to women.

Broaden the question beyond Jefferson's personal attitudes and suffrage, and the case for Democratic-Republican "feminism" is as easy to make as the one for Jeffersonian sexism. The female political activities described in Catherine Allgor's book on early Washington, D.C., took place in a capital dominated by Jeffersonians, while Susan Branson found a great deal of actively ideological political consciousness among women in the Democratic-Republican circles of 1790s Philadelphia. Famous female Federalists like Abigail Adams and the early feminist writer Judith Sargent Murray were never active in Federalist politics, while a Republican woman like Margaret Bache, wife of two successive Philadelphia Aurora editors and part owner of the shop, lived most of her life in the nerve center of Philadelphia political activism and shared fully in many of the events and projects that transpired there. (71)

While he generally echoes much of the Founder Studies and Slave Power literature and shares their sour view of Jefferson as a person, Bernstein's intellectual honesty leads him to end the book with a somewhat jarring admission that even a harsh assessment of Jefferson's character and his record on slavery can hardly touch his tremendous impact on American history and culture "or his ultimate claims to fame." Great leftists and liberators like Ho Chi Minh and Abraham Lincoln looked to Jefferson for inspiration. Lincoln regarded "Jefferson's principles" as "'the definitions and axioms of free society.'" Jefferson was "the leading spokesman for the revolution of ideas that changed, and that continues to change, the face of America and the world" (Bernstein, 198). Jefferson's democratic political ideals, in other words, are the reason to study him, a fact that has been easy to lose sight of over the course of the long effort to personalize our history.

(1) The five books under review will hereinafter be cited parenthetically in order to document quotations.

(2) The works alluded to are Thorn Hartmann, What Would Jefferson Do? A Return to Democracy (New York, 2004); and Donald T. Phillips, The Founding Fathers on Leadership: Classic Teamwork in Changing Times (New York, 1997).

(3) Wendy C. Wick, George Washington, an American Icon: The Eighteenth-Century Graphic Portraits (Washington, D.C., 1982); Barry Schwartz, George Washington: The Making of an American Symbol (New York, 1987); Jan Lewis and Peter S. Onuf, "American Synecdoche: Thomas Jefferson as Image, Icon, Character, and Self," American Historical Review, 103 (February 1998), 125-36 (quotation on p. 125): Merrill D. Peterson, The Jefferson Image in the American Mind (New York, 1960).

(4) The application of "Jeffersonian" to the Iraq situation may stem from a crack made in Colin Powell's autobiography: "It is naive, however, to think that if Saddam had fallen [during the first war with Iraq in 1991], he would necessarily have been replaced by a Jeffersonian in some sort of desert democracy where people read The Federalist Papers along with the Koran" (Colin L. Powell with Joseph E. Persico, My American Journey [New York, 1995], 527). If the term's use in the context of Iraq did have this pejorative origin, then its subsequent employment only amplifies the point that the Jefferson symbol may not be in the best of health.

(5) This rather conventional point is greatly amplified by contributions of James E. Lewis Jr., Jack N. Rakove, Michael A. Bellesiles, and the present author to James Horn, Jan Ellen Lewis, and Peter S. Onuf, eds., The Revolution of 1800: Democracy, Race, and the New Republic (Charlottesville, 2002).

(6) Toby Harnden, "Man Who Set Out to Get Iraq's Mafioso." London Daily Telegraph, April 5, 2003, p. 9 (quotations); Bill Keller, "The Sunshine Warrior," New York Times Magazine, September 22, 2002, pp. 48-55, 84, 88, 96-97.

(7) Oliver Burkeman, "Secret Report Throws Doubt on Democracy Hopes," Manchester (Eng.) Guardian, March 15, 2003, p. 5 (first and second quotations); "Democracy in Iraq?" transcript of segment from NewsHour with Jim Lehrer broadcast for February 27, 2003, http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/middle_east/jan-june03/democracy_2-27.html (third quotation).

(8) Wills claims not to use "slave power" in the conspiratorial sense often deployed by abolitionists and Republicans in the 1850s, but he clearly treats all the policies and constitutional provisions that benefited or helped expand slavery back through the beginning of U.S. history--even if seemingly unintentional or as part of some larger development--as contributing to something more sinister than patterns of economic growth or politicians representing their region's economic interests (Wills, 9-13). Wills draws most heavily on William W. Freehling, The Road to Disunion. Vol. I: Secessionists at Bay. 1776-1854 (New York, 1990); Paul Finkelman, Slavery. and the Founders: Race and Liberty in the Age of Jefferson (2nd ed., Armonk, N.Y., 2001); and Leonard L. Richards, The Slave Power: The Free North and Southern Domination, 1780-1860 (Baton Rouge, 2000).

(9) On Democratic-Republican radicalism, see Joyce Appleby, Capitalism and a New Social Order: The Republican Vision of the 1790s (New York, 1984); Michael Durey, "Thomas Paine's Apostles: Radical Emigres and the Triumph of Jeffersonian Republicanism," William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 44 (October 1987), 661-88; Michael Durey, Transatlantic Radicals and the Early American Republic (Lawrence, Kans., 1997); Howard B. Rock, Artisans of the New Republic: The Tradesmen of New York City in the Age of Jefferson (New York, 1979); Howard B. Rock, "The Artisan and the State in the 1790s: A Comparison of New York and London," in Paul A. Gilje and William Pencak, eds., New York in the Age of the Constitution, 1775-1800 (Rutherford, N.J., 1992), 74-97; and Alfred F. Young, The Democratic Republicans of New York: The Origins, 1763-1797 (Chapel Hill, 1967).

(10) Rosemarie Zagarri, A Woman's Dilemma: Mercy Otis Warren and the American Revolution (Wheeling, Ill., 1995); Susan Branson, These Fiery Frenchified Dames: Women and Political Culture in Early National Philadelphia (Philadelphia, 2001); Dorothy Weil, In Defense of Women: Susanna Rowson (1762-1824) (University Park, Pa., 1976).

(11) The specific quotation is from a toast given at Clinton, N.Y., July 4, 1802, printed in the Poughkeepsie (N.Y.) Political Barometer, July 20, 1802. For more on the general point made, as well as many other examples, see Jeffrey L. Pasley, "The Cheese and the Words: Popular Political Culture and Participatory Democracy in the Early American Republic," in Jeffrey L. Pasley, Andrew W. Robertson, and David Waldstreicher, eds., Beyond the Founders: New Approaches to the Political History of the Early American Republic (Chapel Hill, 2004), 31-56; and Jeffrey L. Pasley, "1800 as a Revolution in Political Culture: Newspapers, Celebrations, Voting, and Democratization in the Early Republic," in Horn, Lewis, and Onuf, eds., Revolution of 1800, pp. 121-52.

(12) "Hortensius," Poughkeepsie Political Barometer, August 16, 1803.

(13) "A few spontaneous Thoughts, occasioned by reading the account of the delivery of Louisiana to the United States, and the latest accounts from England and France," Newburgh (N.Y.) Rights of Man, March 5, 1804.

(14) Norfolk (Va.) Epitome of the Times, reprinted in Portsmouth (N.H.) Republican Ledger, July 7, 1801 (first and second quotations); Poughkeepsie Political Barometer, July 20, 1802 (third quotation).

(15) Reprinted in Kingston (N.Y.) Plebeian, September 16, 1805.

(16) Joyce Appleby, Thomas Jefferson (New York. 2003); Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (New York, 2005).

(17) Peterson, Jefferson Image, 347-54, 360-63. The quotation is from Roosevelt's speech before the 1936 Democratic National Convention, reprinted in John Gabriel Hunt, ed., The Essential Franklin Delano Roosevelt (New York, 1995), 115.

(18) Peterson, Jefferson Image, 355-60 (second and third quotations on p. 355); Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, September 6, 1789, in Thomas Jefferson, Writings, edited by Merrill D. Peterson (New York, 1984), 959 (first quotation).

(19) Charles M. Wiltse, "Jeffersonian Democracy: A Dual Tradition," American Political Science Review, 28 (October 1934), 838-51; Charles Maurice Wiltse, The Jeffersonian Tradition in American Democracy (2nd ed, New York, 1960).

(20) Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, October 28, 1785, in Jefferson, Writings, 842.

(21) Max J. Evans, Documenting Democracy, 1964-2004 (Washington, D.C., 2004), 3, pamphlet available at http://www.archives.gov/nhprc/about/chronology.pdf; Peterson, Jefferson Image, 439-42.

(22) Quoted in Jonathan Gross, "When Jefferson Dined Alone," February 12, 2006, History News Network, http://hnn.us/articles/20061.html#ednref11.

(23) [William Loughton Smith], The Pretensions of Thomas Jefferson to the Presidency Examined; and the Charges against John Adams Refuted. Addressed to the Citizens of America in General; and Particularly to the Electors of the President. ([Philadelphia], 1796), 16.

(24) Ibid., 15. The other pamphlet mentioned is [William Loughton Smith], The Politicks and Views of a Certain Party, Displayed ([Philadelphia?], 1792).

(25) [Smith], Pretensions of Thomas Jefferson, 15-16 (first quotation on p. 15), 4 (second quotation). See also David Daggett, Sun-Beams May Be Extracted from Cucumbers, but the Process Is Tedious. An Oration, Pronounced on the Fourth of July. 1799. At the Request of the Citizens of New-Haven. (New Haven, 1799), 26. An excellent account of the Federalists' satirical attacks on Jeffersonian natural philosophy appears in Linda K. Kerber, Federalists in Dissent: Imagery and Ideology in Jeffersonian America (Ithaca, 1970).

(26) Charles O. Lerche Jr., "Jefferson and the Election of 1800: A Case Study in the Political Smear," William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 5 (October 1948), 487-88.

(27) Reading (Pa.) Week1y Advertiser, October 29, 1796.

(28) [Smith], Pretensions of Thomas Jefferson, 64 (first quotation), 16 (second and third quotations).

(29) Theodore Dwight, An Oration, Delivered at New-Haven on the 7th of July, A.D. 1801, before the Society of the Cincinnati, for the State of Connecticut, Assembled to Celebrate the Anniversary of American Independence (Hartford, 1801), 6-7, 29-30 (quotation).

(30) Anti-intellectual populism and religious fearmongering were certainly deployed in various Jacksonian-era campaigns but rarely used in tandem, as they were against Jefferson. The 1840 "Log Cabin" campaign against Martin Van Buren was the closest to being an exception to my generalization, but Van Buren was lampooned more as an effeminate fop than a nutty professor. The best account of the Jacksonian-era campaigns is now Wilentz, Rise of American Democracy, but see also Robert Gray Gunderson, The Log-Cabin Campaign (Lexington, 1957); and Robert V. Remini, The Election of Andrew Jackson (Philadelphia, 1963).

(31) A genuine scholarly history of this process, especially the last part, has yet to be written, but works that influenced my understanding of the developments described in this paragraph and the next include Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle, eds., The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930-1980 (Princeton, 1989); Michael Barone, Our Country: The Shaping of America from Roosevelt to Reagan (New York, 1990); James T. Patterson, Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (New York, 1996); Thomas Frank, One Market Under God: Extreme Capitalism, Market Populism, and the End of Economic Democracy (New York, 2000); and Thomas Frank, What's the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America (New York, 2004).

(32) James Miller, "Democracy Is in the Streets": From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago (New York, 1987), 51.

(33) Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72 (1973; new edition, New York, 1983), 209. "[C]ontemptuous of liberalism" was one of the qualities described as "pure New Left" by the student movement's sympathetic participant-historian Todd Gitlin in The Sixties: Years of Hope. Days of Rage (New York, 1987). 382.

(34) David Farber, Chicago '68 (1988; reprint, Chicago, 1994), 227-30 (first quotation on p. 228: second and third quotations on p. 229).

(35) Gitlin, Sixties, 362-84. A classic account of this process appears in Sara Evans, Personal Politics: The Roots of Women's Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left (New York, 1979).

(36) An opinionated but useful political and intellectual history of New Left and post New Left historiography appears in Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The "Objectivity Question" and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge, Eng., 1988), part 4. For a good sampling of the "new history" as it was, see Barton J. Bernstein, ed., Towards a New Past." Dissenting Essays in American History (New York, 1968), while a more mature and less politicized version is laid out in Eric Foner, ed., The New American History (revised ed., Philadelphia, 1997). Two examples of "new histories" in which party politicians turn up as the villains are Alan Dawley, Class and Community: The Industrial Revolution in Lynn (Cambridge. Mass., 1976); and (ironically given his more recent work) Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788-1850 (New York, 1984).

(37) Winthrop D. Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812 (Chapel Hill, 1968).

(38) Charles B. Dew, "The Slavery Experience," in John B. Boles and Evelyn Thomas Nolen, eds., Interpreting Southern History: Historiographical Essays in Honor of Sanford W. Higginbotham (Baton Rouge, 1987), 134-35; Scot A. French and Edward L. Ayers, "The Strange Career of Thomas Jefferson: Race and Slavery in American Memory, 1943-1993," in Peter S. Onuf, ed., Jeffersonian Legacies (Charlottesville, 1993), 418-56; Jan Ellen Lewis and Peter S. Onuf, eds., Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson." History Memory, and Civic Culture (Charlottesville, 1999); Annette Gordon-Reed, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy (Charlottesville, 1997).

(39) Drew R. McCoy, The Elusive Republic: Political Economy in Jeffersonian America (Chapel Hill, 1980); J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, 1975), chap. 15: Lance Banning, The Jeffersonian Persuasion: Evolution of a Party Ideology (Ithaca, 1978): John M. Murrin, "The Great Inversion, or Court versus Country: A Comparison of the Revolution Settlements in England (1688-1721) and America (1776-1816)," in J. G. A. Pocock, ed., Three British Revolutions: 1641, 1688, 1776 (Princeton, 1980), 368-453.

(40) Applehy, Capitalism and a New Social Order, ix (quotation): Appleby, Liberalism and Republicanism in the Historical Imagination (Cambridge, Mass 1992), especially "What is Still American in Jefferson's Political Philosophy?" (pp. 291-3191.

(41) Freehling, Road to Disunion, may have started this trend.

(42) Paul Finkelman, "Jefferson and Slavery: 'Treason Against the Hopes of the World,'" in Onuf, ed., Jeffersonian Legacies, 181-221: Finkelman, Slavery and the Founders, especially chaps. 6 and 7; Peter Nicolaisen, "Thomas Jefferson in the 1990s," Amerikastudien/American Studies, 43, no. 4 (1998), 693-703.

(43) Conor Cruise O'Brien, The Long Affair: Thomas Jefferson and the French Revolution, 1785-1800 (Chicago, 1996); Conor Cruise O'Brien, "Thomas Jefferson: Radical and Racist," Atlantic Monthly, October 1996, pp. 53-74 (quotations on p. 53).

(44) O'Brien, "Thomas Jefferson," 58 (second, third, and fourth quotations), 64 (sixth quotation), 70 (fifth quotation); Thomas Jefferson to William Short, January 3, 1793, in Jefferson, Writings, 1004 (first quotation); Jefferson to William S. Smith, November 13, 1787, ibid., 911 (seventh quotation).

(45) For substantive accounts of what inspired the Oklahoma City bombing, see Kenneth S. Stern, A Force Upon the Plain: The American Militia Movement and the Politics of Hate (New York, 1996); Daniel Levitas, The Terrorist Next Door: The Militia Movement and the Radical Right (New York, 2002); and Michael Barkun, Religion and the Racist Right." The Origins of the Christian Identity Movement (Chapel Hill, 1997). Most readers will not be reminded of Thomas Jefferson once acquainted with the beliefs of these groups.

(46) Among the more prominent works in the first wave of "Founder Studies" were Joseph J. Ellis, Passionate Sage: The Character and Legacy of John Adams (New York, 1993); Joanne B. Freeman, "Dueling as Politics: Reinterpreting the Burr-Hamilton Duel." William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 53 (April 1996), 289-318; Joseph J. Ellis, American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson (New York, 1997); Joanne B. Freeman, "The Election of 1800: A Study in the Logic of Political Change," Yale Law Journal, 108 (June 1999), 1959-94; Joseph J. Ellis, Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation (New York, 2000); David McCullough, John Adams (New York, 2001) and Joanne B. Freeman, Affairs of Honor: National Politics in the New Republic (New Haven, 2001). For a news article exploring Freeman's perspective, see Jeff Sharlet, "'I Was a Teenage Hamiltonian,'" Chronicle of Higher Education, September 14, 2001, p. A16. For critical commentaries on the phenomenon, also known as "Founders Chic," see Sean Wilentz, "America Made Easy: McCullough, Adams, and the Decline of Popular History," New Republic, July 2, 2001, pp. 35-40: Jeffrey L. Pasley, "Federalist Chic," Common-Place, 2 (January 2002), http://www.common-place.org/publick/200202.shtml; David Waldstreicher, "Founders Chic As Culture War," Radical History Review, no. 84 (Fall 2002), 185-94; and Allan Kulikoff, "The Founding Fathers: Best Sellers! TV Stars! Punctual Plumbers!" Journal of the Historical Society, 5 (Spring 2005), 155-87. The beginning of a historiographic response to Founder Studies is presented in Pasley, Robertson, and Waldstreicher, eds., Beyond the Founders.

(47) Ellis, Founding Brothers, 12.

(48) Evan Thomas, "Founders Chic: Live from Philadelphia," Newsweek, July 9, 2001, pp. 48-49 (quotations on p. 49).

(49) On the culture wars as they have involved American history, see Edward T. Linenthal and Tom Engelhardt, History War: The Enola Gay and Other Battles for the American Past (New York, 1996). For examples of the Founders used as "culture war" fodder, see Richard Brookhiser, What Would the Founders Do? Our Questions, Their Answers (New York, 2006); William J. Bennett, Our Country's Founders: A Book of Advice for Young People (New York, 1998); and William J. Bennett, Our Sacred Honor: Words of Advice From the Founders in Stories, Letters, Poems, and Speeches (Nashville, 1997).

(50) Thomas, "Founders Chic," 49.

(51) The most extensive scholarly argument along these lines is Doron Ben-Atar and Barbara B. Oberg, eds., Federalists Reconsidered (Charlottesville, 1998). The Hamilton best seller was Ron Chernow, Alexander Hamilton (New York, 2004), one of the most recent entries in the Founder Studies genre and a book that laudably does not slight policy and electoral politics to the degree that McCullough and Freeman did, though it is somewhat worse in terms of its eagerness to credit its subject at the expense of other figures.

(52) Ellis, Founding Brothers, 113.

(53) Wilentz, Rise of American Democracy, 163.

(54) A devastating critique of both the exhibit and the new celebration of Hamilton appeared in Mike Wallace, "Business-Class Hero," 2004, http://www.gothamcenter.org/hamilton/businessclasshero/index.shtml.

(55) Ellis, Founding Brothers, 199-200. My own very different account of these matters appears in Jeffrey L. Pasley, "The Tyranny of Printers": Newspaper Politics in the Early American Republic (Charlottesville, 2001).

(56) Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick, The Age of Federalism (New York. 1993), 623-25.

(57) James Morton Smith, Freedom's Fetters; The Alien and Sedition Laws and American Civil Liberties (Ithaca, 1956), 182-83.

(58) Gordon S. Brown, Toussaint's Clause: The Founding Fathers and the Haitian Revolution (Jackson, Miss., 2005), 151-52 (quotations on p. 152). In addition, my understanding of the Haitian revolution and U.S. diplomacy toward Haiti draws on Elkins and McKitrick, Age of Federalism, 654-62; and Laurent Dubois. A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787-1804 (Chapel Hill, 2004).

(59) My late University of Missouri colleague Gerard H. Clarfield, author of two books on Pickering, would have been pleased and amused to see his name mentioned so often in so prominent a volume. Wills complains several times about Clarfield's "hostile book" and expresses puzzlement "that some people spend their scholarly lives concentrating on a person they despise" (Wills, 186, 18). Wills obviously never spent much time reading Pickering's letters. Sometimes a scholar grows to despise the person he or she studies through long experience.

(60) Thomas Jefferson to Joseph Priestley, March 21, 1801, in Jefferson, Writings, 1086.

(61) The original lyrics of "Jefferson and Liberty" appeared in the Philadelphia Aurora, January 24, 1801. Another version and similar numbers are reprinted in Vera Brodsky Lawrence. Music for Patriots, Politicians, and Presidents: Harmonies and Discords of the First Hundred Years (New York, 1975), 163-73.

(62) On the Pennsylvania situation see Jeffrey L. Pasley, "'A Journeyman, Either in Law or Politics': John Beckley and the Social Origins of Political Campaigning," Journal of the Early Republic, 16 (Winter 1996), 531-69; and Harry Marlin Tinkcom, The Republicans and Federalists in Pennsylvania, 1790-1801: A Study in National Stimulus and Local Response (Harrisburg, Pa., 1950), chaps. 12 and 13.

(63) Freehling, Road to Disunion. 147.

(64) Jan Lewis, "'Of Every Sex & Condition': The Representation of Women in the Constitution," Journal of the Early Republic, 15 (Autumn 1995), 359-87; Jan Ellen Lewis, "Why the Constitution Includes Women." Common-Place, 2 (July 20(12), http://www.commonplace.org/vol-02/no-04/roundtable/lewis.shtml (quotation). On voting rights in early America, see Chilton Williamson, American Suffrage: From Property to Democracy, 1760-1860 (Princeton, 1960); and Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Contested History. of Democracy in the United States (New York, 2000).

(65) Jefferson to John Adams, October 12, 1813, in Jefferson, Writings, 1301-4 (quotations on p. 1302).

(66) On the contents of Monticello, see Susan R. Stein, The Worlds of Thomas Jefferson at Monticello (New York, 1993).

(67) Andrew Burstein, America's Jubilee (New York, 2001); Andrew Burstein, The Inner Jefferson: Portrait of a Grieving Optimist (Charlottesville, 1995); Andrew Burstein, The Passions of Andrew Jackson (New York, 2003); Andrew Burstein, Sentimental Democracy: The Evolution of America's Romantic Self-Image (New York, 1999); Nancy Isenberg and Andrew Burstein, eds., Mortal Remains: Death in Early America (Philadelphia, 2003).

(68) Ronald P. Formisano, "Deferential-Participant Politics: The Early Republic's Political Culture, 1789-1840," American Political Science Review, 68 (June 1974), 473-87; Ronald P. Formisano, "Federalists and Republicans: Parties, Yes--System, No," in Paul Kleppner et al., The Evolution of American Electoral Systems (Westport, Conn., 1981), 33-76; Ronald P. Formisano, The Transformation of Political Culture: Massachusetts Parties, 1790s-1840s (New York, 1983): Ralph Ketcham, Presidents Above Party: The First American Presidency, 1789-1829 (Chapel Hill, 1984). Outstanding examples of the rejected approach, which continued to be practiced even as historiographic trends cut somewhat unfairly against it, include Noble E. Cunningham Jr., The Jeffersonian Republicans: The Formation of Party Organization, 1789-1801 (Chapel Hill, 1957); Noble E. Cunningham Jr., The Jeffersonian Republicans in Power: Party Operations, 1801-1809 (Chapel Hill, 1963); William Nisbet Chambers, Political Parties in a New Nation: The American Experience, 1776-1809 (New York, 1963); Carl E. Prince, New Jersey's Jeffersonian Republicans: The Genesis of an Early Party Machine. 1789-1817 (Chapel Hill, 1967); Young, Democratic-Republicans of New York; Carl E. Prince, The Federalists and the Origins of the U.S. Civil Service (New York, 1977); and James H. Broussard, The Southern Federalists, 1800-1816 (Baton Rouge, 1978). The two approaches co-existed somewhat uneasily in William Nisbet Chambers and Walter Dean Burnham, eds., The American Party Systems: Stages of Political Development (New York, 1967); and Paul Goodman, The Democratic-Republicans of Massachusetts: Politics in a Young Republic (Cambridge, Mass., 1964).

(69) Freeman, Affairs of Honor.

(70) For versions of the argument that Jefferson and the Republicans were less friendly than the Federalists to women's political participation, see Jan Lewis, "'The Blessings of Domestic Society': Thomas Jefferson's Family and the Transformation of American Politics," in Onuf, ed., Jeffersonian Legacies, 109-46; and Ben-Atar and Oberg, eds.. Federalists Reconsidered, chap. 6. On the case of the New Jersey women, see Judith Apter Klinghoffer and Lois Elkis, "'The Petticoat Electors': Women's Suffrage in New Jersey, 1776-1807," Journal of the Early Republic, 12 (Summer 1992), 159-93.

(71) Catherine Allgor, Parlor Politics: In Which the Ladies of Washington Help Build a City and a Government (Charlottesville, 2000); Branson, These Fiery Frenchified Dames; Pasley, "The Tyranny of Printers," chap. 4.

MR. PASLEY is an associate professor of history at the University of Missouri-Columbia.