Notes: Considers collections of portraits as republican pantheons which at once bestowed honor on various worthies and held them up for emulation. American pantheons often aggrandized eminent sitters through severe, self-effacing formats even as they emphasized accuracy of countenance rather than "improved" portrayals. Pays special attention to five important collections of faces, TJ's assemblage of portraits, Trumbull's Declaration of Independence scene, Charles Willson Peale's gallery, Joseph Delaplaine's collection, and the New York City Hall pantheon. Chapter four takes up the question of supposed American degeneracy (the Buffon thesis).

Reference: 408.

Notes: Uses the January 16, 1811 letter to Benjamin Rush in which TJ describes telling Hamilton that Bacon, Newton, and Locke were "my trinity of the three greatest men the world had ever produced" and Hamilton's supposed rejoinder that "the greatest man ... was Julius Caesar." Sensitive and critical attention to the rhetorical strategies of the letter supports a delineation of the role of Enlightenment progressivism in TJ's thought and practice. Contrasts TJ and William Blake's visions of revolutionary awakening, suggesting that the Declaration "can be understood as a shining public poem of a kind that Blake aspired to produce," but concluding that TJ lived in a world where such visions could be given a social reality. Blake's recurrent scenes of humanity casting off the nightmares of space and time, science, and history contrast with TJ's Monticello, luminously fixed in space and time.

Reference: 409.

Notes: The first of these chapters portrays TJ's and Madison's work for religious liberty, emphasizing their understanding of first amendment rights as insisting upon an essential distinction between civil and religious functions in society. Claims TJ may have felt even more strongly about religious liberty than about political liberty, and that during his presidency and after, TJ "retreated in no way from his single-minded dedication to religious liberty." The second chapter treats TJ and Adams as enlightened thinkers about religion. Influenced by Richard Price and Joseph Priestley, TJ set out to reveal a "natural, reasonable Christianity," and like Adams, he saw the test of religion in its link to morality. States that "both Adams and Jefferson had within them the essence of the religious spirit." Well-informed, brings together TJ's comments about religious liberty that prove to be a stumbling block for those who wish to diminish his authority for a rigorous interpretation of first amendment rights, but by separating into different chapters discussions of religious liberty and of rational morality grounded in religion evades the ground upon which their readings stand.

Reference: 410.

Notes: TJ's and Madison's struggles for religious liberty from the Virginia Statute and the First Amendment through their presidential careers and after. Notes TJ's anti-clericalism and his commitment to the basic freedom of the mind as a God-given right. The usual story, well told.

Reference: 411.

Notes: Discusses four facets of TJ's libertarian career: political liberty, religious liberty, liberty vs. equality, and academic liberty. Sees TJ as leaning toward liberty in the fundamental antagonism (as Tocqueville saw it) between liberty and equality. On the question of equality for Indians, blacks, and women, "theory pulled in one direction, experience (or political reality) in another." Somewhat uncritical, except for discussion about the problems of equality.

Reference: 412.

Notes: Compares TJ's and Madison's theological beliefs and calls for a "clearer understanding and a renewed appreciation of the religious and philosophical principles that were so essential" in their work.

Reference: 413.

Notes: Supposedly on TJ's gardening and landscaping at Monticello. Not seen.

Reference: 414.

Notes: A good account of TJ's changing attitudes toward government support of internal improvements charted against his eventual turn to a states rights position, more or less, in his final years. Although he was initially enthusiastic about improvements as a form of progress, negative considerations kept breaking in where the federal government was concerned. In his 6th Annual Message he proposed using federal money for internal improvements, but in the years after 1816 he moved toward the states rights position shared by many of his Virginia acquaintances and opposed the plans of John Quincy Adams. Claims it was not capitalism he opposed but "consolidation."

Reference: 415.

Notes: Based upon an attentive study of the language of the Summary View , argues that it "keeps transforming itself from a resolution of `instruction' into a letter to the King" in which TJ turns history into what he calls an "American story." This becomes a narrative about American freedom and a discovery of mythical ancestors for an American "free people." An excellent consideration of this text as a literary performance.

Reference: 416.

Notes: Describes TJ's Statute for Religious Freedom as the basis for an understanding of American pluralism and examines the threats to it posed by the religious right, the religious left, and the secularists. One consequence of these threats may be the loss of the public schools as a common ground for society.

Reference: 417.

Notes: On the efforts of Peter Hatch to restore appropriate plantings at Monticello. As Monticello's resident horticulturist he is concerned both with restoring the gardens as they might have been in TJ's time and with educating visitors about historic plants and gardens.

Reference: 418.

Notes: Discusses the aesthetic sensibility of 1787. Calls TJ "the father of American architectural thought (as distinct from mere building." Both his ideas about building and the ideas of the American Constitution grew from the secular humanism that was their common moral root.

Reference: 419.

Notes: The late 1970's effort of Nevada to lay claim to unappropriated federal land within its borders "was as though the ghost of Thomas Jefferson had walked and spoken again, this time in the Great Basin, without much consideration for what had happened to the Republic in the century and a half since his death." Cites TJ as one of the first to try to formulate a land policy, but over the next 190 years the Jeffersonian dream of a society in which allodial land policy would prevail gave way slowly to non-allodial policy in which the federal government "increasingly assumed the role of `lord paramount'."

Reference: 420.

Notes: Describes a newly installed permanent exhibit at Monticello dedicated to TJ's domestic life and interests.

Reference: 421.

Notes: States that it is somewhat simplistic to focus on TJ and the University of Virginia as the archetypal model of the state university. Discusses William R. Davie of North Carolina and Abraham Baldwin of Georgia and compares them in passing to TJ.

Reference: 422.

Notes: TJ's comments about the Constitution to both European and American correspondents reflected his sense of the importance of Europe and European opinion concerning the U. S. He needed to reassure European friends about incidents such as Shay's Rebellion even as he needed to temper some of their exaggerated optimism. His view of European monarchy and despotism influenced his writings to American correspondents about the dangers of unchecked authority. The Constitution was a counter to European pessimism and a cause of concern to his American friends. The Bill of Rights was important on both sides of the Atlantic, and in Europe was the source of immediate foreign policy advantages.

Reference: 423.

Notes: Praise for the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom as marking TJ as one who left his country better for his having lived. His wall of separation between Church and State finds separate expression in Mendelssohn's Jerusalem (1783). TJ and Mendelssohn believed that true religious beliefs were not dependent on special supernatural revelation or any religion's scriptures. Both affirmed that essential liberty is not a mere civil liberty but absolute, an essential part of the definition of man.

Reference: 424.

Notes: Note on the Jefferson administration's 1806 prosecution of the editors of The Connecticut Courant for seditious libel.

Reference: 425.

Notes: Discusses TJ's life-long interest in architecture; notes his commitment to classical values and their Palladian reinterpretation, his inspiration by French architecture, and his activities as an architect in Virginia. Survey, most useful for its coverage of TJ's influence on domestic architecture such as Bremo, Barboursville, and Oak Hill to which he variously contributed suggestions or drawings. Illustrated with photographs and drawings.

Reference: 426.

Notes: As part of a larger argumentative strategy intended to oppose the deterministic aspects of the work of historians of republican/country ideology, the author explores TJ's intellectual "grand design" for a regime of self-governing people. Claims the Declaration of Independence provides the context for the significance of TJ's other achievements and focuses particularly on his proposed revisal of the laws of Virginia. States that "the revisal's rough journey through the Virginia General Assembly testifies to the political and psychic barriers separating Jefferson from those fellow planters in whose midst he lived and on whose votes his measures depended." Recognizes but perhaps somewhat underestimates the problematic textual status of the laws and the possible role of others, on or off the Committee of Revisors, and by treating the revisions as if they were a fully adequate index to Jefferson's thought, tends to deny some of their historic specificity. A stimulating discussion, but readers should also consult Julian Boyd's editorial note in Papers , vol 2, 305-24.

Reference: 427.

Notes: Contends that in early republican America taxonomic construction of the natural order was "a rehearsal, so to speak, of social and political construction." TJ's "overwhelmingly static, synchronic presentation of knowledge in the Notes on Virginia was intended to foster" a social and political homogeneity demanded by his "reactionary anxiety." A strong point, but ignores TJ's welcoming of generations' independence from each other, the possibility of recurrent revolutionary violence, and other recognitions of the inevitability of change.

Reference: 428.