Notes: Asserting that "Silence is the vital interstice in a consensual literature," explores the way TJ, Franklin, Adams and others impose the text as higher reality in the interest of exerting hegemonic control in their society. The interpenetration of language, belief, and power becomes a means to control that which cannot be written about. TJ discussed
Publication: passim , suggestively if perhaps a bit glibly at times.

Reference: 320.

Notes: Claims TJ's changing conception of God passed through three broad phases: an Anglican phase in which he was raised, a deist phase from his college years until his fifties, and a final moralist phase "under the deep influence of Unitarians and Universalists." Mostly conventional sketch, a bit simplistic, particularly when it tries too hard to make TJ an upper case U Unitarian.

Reference: 321.

Notes: Well informed account of TJ's religious thinking, emphasizing his later theism. Underestimates perhaps the power of his early skepticism, but traces in some detail his response to Price, Priestley, and Rush as he developed his own kind of Christian position. Notes his anticlericalism and his disdain for what he saw as corruptions of the pure principles of Jesus. Suggests the complexity of his attitudes and connects it to the "intensity and earnestness" of his private spiritual inquiry.

Reference: 322.

Notes: Satire; a "public-relations counsel" could have made the Declaration more catchy or, even better (worse?), could have urged TJ to go for the big bucks by going into public relations and representing "the biggest client of them all," King George.

Reference: 323.

Notes: Sketch of TJ as an agrarian and a nostalgic mythmaker whose thinking was carried further by Taylor and Randolph. While TJ's sympathies in his later years were more strongly in line with the agrarianism of Taylor, this essay may overstate the case somewhat and overlook the revolutionary potential of the university project.

Reference: 324.

Notes: Contends that "the optimism and breadth of approach embodied in the Ordinance of 1784 can be understood only when perceived both in the light of general American dreams of expansion in the previous quarter of a century and in the light of Jefferson's own perception of America's republican future." Claims that TJ's ideals give the Ordinance its distinctiveness even though many of its expansionist ideas appeared in one form or another in the previous three decades. His views of the natural rights of man and of the nature of government shaped the report of the Congressional committee designated to plan for the Western lands. At the heart of his beliefs were the three conditions stated in the last provisos--republican governments in the new states, no hereditary titles (a response to the Cincinnati), and no slavery.

Reference: 325.

Notes: Emphasizes the concrete circumstances of TJ's experience in Virginia, especially, as the primary influence on his notions of what American republicanism should be. Finds the years between 1776 and 1783 as crucial, and examines TJ's largely unsuccessful attempts to reshape the constitutional grounds of a republican Virginia. Grants him a fuller commitment to political equality than many contemporaries, but describes his "less than fully democratic sensibilities" which preserved the role of elite leaders.

Reference: 326.

Notes: Shows how Walker used the jeremiadic tradition of the American Puritans to rebut TJ's comments about blacks in the Notes . Both Walker and TJ inherited a view of American exceptionalism, and the Declaration as a textual palimpsest contains the jeremiad as one of its layered rhetorical possibilities. Walker exemplifies the "apocalyptic tone of the Jeffersonian Jeremiad" to call for a new society of peace and justice.

Reference: 327.

Notes: Well-informed essay on TJ's interest in and knowledge about the West, his backing of various exploring expeditions (especially those of Lewis and Clark and Dunbar and Freeman), and his encouragement of the dissemination of reports and data from the expeditions. Notes that although TJ never went west of Staunton, Virginia, until late in his life, he had the curiosity and knowledge to be a good explorer himself, although his migraine headaches and his psychological inability to detach himself from his family would have worked against him.

Reference: 328.

Notes: Defends the centrality of TJ's Declaration of Independence as both a statement of American principle and as an instrument of government against charges to the contrary by Russell Kirk and others. Points to TJ's own understanding of the document, both as he wrote it and after the fact, to the responses of the colonial assemblies to it, and to the weight put on it by Abraham Lincoln at a crucial point in our history.

Reference: 329.

Notes: Describes a meal "modeled on late eighteenth-century dishes known to have been served--or that might have been served--at the White House during TJ's Presidency or at Monticello." Menu and selected recipes.

Reference: 330.

Notes: Credits TJ with demonstrating the potential of the presidency as an institution of popular government, although agreeing with the contention that republican policy impaired the nation's ability to determine its own destiny. If TJ accomplished the republican aim of eliminating the national debt and excessive taxes, he also diminished the funds necessary for the naval and military establishment increasingly necessary to protect American interests in his second term. TJ developed beyond his predecessors the policy-making role of the president, yet he preserved a popular base of legitimacy. The failure of the embargo, however, undermined the credibility of presidential activism, and encouraged the shift of power toward Congress which occurred in the next two decades. A solid essay on TJ as presidential leader.

Reference: 331.

Notes: Describes TJ's garden practices and the work of Peter Hatch to restore the Monticello gardens. One of the best popular articles on the gardens for gardeners since it offers more detailed information than most.

Reference: 332.

Notes: Contends that the U.S. as a revolutionary nation held ideas about its place in the world that threatened to overturn established international relations and that TJ on at least three issues was the chief expounder of such radical positions. In the Summary View and the Declaration his interpretation of history opposed the conventional British understanding of it; he based in natural law a conception of the law of nations that was unfamiliar to the old world, and in arguing for the validity in 1793 of the treaty made with the French old regime, he set forth the opinion that treaties were not with monarchs but with nations. If the goals were revolutionary, TJ's diplomacy, however, was not. Describes his statecraft as motivated by a desire to preserve and extend the American republic and by a belief that Britain posed the greatest threat to it, although he was not blind to the threats posed by French interests, particularly after the rise of Napoleon. Notes his occasional lapses in judgment and his overreaching himself in the case of the embargo.

Reference: 333.

Notes: Recent excavations of the Mulberry Row site suggest that over the years TJ tended increasingly to house slaves in single-family houses (doing away with larger housing groups more prevalent in the early years of Monticello) and also to become more aware of sanitation issues (at least one house had wooden floors instead of the more typical earth). There is also some evidence, although not clearly explained here, for continuing African traditions. All the houses had root cellars which offered storage not only for food items but also for private possessions. Ceramic fragments point to the presence of a large amount of various wares; building "O" alone yielded bits from 289 different vessels.

Reference: 334.

Notes: Surveys TJ's interest in and efforts for education from the 1778 Bill for the More General Diffusing of Knowledge to the founding of the University of Virginia. Notes his attention to the ideas of others about education, particularly in the 1780's and 1790's, but notes that TJ's plans were often quite original taken as a whole. His ideas were not always acted upon, however, in part because he placed too much trust in the popular desire for knowledge, but they were in many ways more practical than those who believed that schools and colleges could go on in the way they always had. His design for a university curriculum was a forerunner of later American institutions, yet it had relatively little direct influence since he was in effect "in the wrong place at the wrong time."

Reference: 335.

Notes: Offers a vigorous condensation of the position first set forward in his 1963 Jefferson and Civil Liberties: The Darker Side . This provides an even more dramatic shattering of the image of TJ as the "plaster saint" of libertarianism, but it also reveals the tendency to caricature his position. "Explains" the disparity between TJ's powerful expressions of civil rights and his actual practice in terms of his supposed timidity, vanity, and shallowness. Claims he "had no systematic and consistent philosophy of freedom," and he was thus ill-equipped to deal with issues that came up such as the Burr business, General Wilkinson, etc., having no more than "ritualistic affirmation of nebulous and transcendental truths" to support him. Effective demolition of TJ as plaster saint, but not so good at explanation.

Reference: 336.

Notes: Revision of the author's 1933 biographical sketch from the Dictionary of American Biography .

Reference: 337.

Notes: Describing three manifestations of the Enlightenment, Moderate, Skeptical, and Revolutionary, claims TJ was influenced by the first and third but not at all by the second. Perhaps for this reason, finds TJ's admiration of the skeptic Bolingbroke as odd. Surveys TJ's interests in philosophy, political theory, religion and science as they reflect enlightenment influences; informative, but would gain from offering a theory of the enlightenment that was more than taxonomic.

Reference: 338.