'Most Blessed of Patriarchs,' by Gordon-Reed and Onuf

With Thomas Jefferson, biographers face a tough question. What should we make of the gap between Jefferson’s world-historical importance in the progress of equality and his rule over a plantation of enslaved men, women and children? How do we make sense of the difference between Jefferson’s words and his actions? Should we be moved by Jefferson’s greatness, or should we pull down his statues?

In “‘Most Blessed of the Patriarchs’: Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of the Imagination,” Annette Gordon-Reed and Peter S. Onuf choose a different path for the biographer. Instead of offering a verdict, they aim “to consider the way he saw himself moving through a world he had helped bring into being.” That is, their goal is to “understand what Thomas Jefferson thought he was doing in the world.”

In this, they have captured Jefferson precisely where Jefferson has previously remained elusive. Jefferson longed for privacy, and he built a wall of separation between his public life and his personal one. Jefferson destroyed the letters to and from his wife, though he dutifully and ingeniously preserved a vast correspondence. And although he opened his home to all comers, he designed clever architectural tricks to preserve his privacy in that home. In their important book, Gordon-Reed and Onuf place Jefferson where he did not want to be placed, connecting dots that he preferred remained scattered.

Their argument is twofold. The first is revealed by the title. In one of his letters, Jefferson referred to himself as a “patriarch,” which, as Gordon-Reed and Onuf remind us, is a word that qualifies Jefferson as a man of the Enlightenment, the philosophical movement that so fundamentally challenged (and destroyed) received notions of authority. As a patriarch, Jefferson exercised a form of “autocratic” rule at home even as he railed against inequality in political life. The second part of their argument is that Jefferson was changed by France. Jefferson was attracted to and flattered by French cosmopolitanism and its confirmation of the possibility of human progress guided by reason alone. But Jefferson also worried that French cultivation came with inauthenticity, an inegalitarian preoccupation with rank, and “a spirit of female intrigue.”

Unlike Benjamin Franklin, Jefferson did not throw himself into French society. Rather than succeed Franklin as the “face of America,” Jefferson preferred a different path, making his home the “center of his life.” Although he made friends, visited the salons and attended the opera, Jefferson more typically spent his dinners at his residence in the Hôtel de Langeac, a home he immediately renovated and made his own. Within that household, he wrote letters to young Americans, sermonizing about the superiority of American domesticity, a domesticity that he discovered and constructed in France.

It was in the home he created in France that Jefferson likely made some sort of arrangement with his enslaved concubine, Sally Hemings. Because both Jefferson and Sally knew that Sally could petition for freedom in France, Jefferson had to change the inner workings of his already complex management of two sets of families. For example, Jefferson paid Sally and her brother James wages, “indeed very good wages by French standards,” a practice he would continue in America with other members of the Hemings family.

Sally Hemings also extracted a promise from Jefferson that she (and her children) would be treated as something other than enslaved upon return to Virginia, a promise that she knew could never be legally binding. She chose to return to Virginia with Jefferson, and, according to Gordon-Reed and Onuf, that choice — “that Jefferson was able to pull this off” — must have depended on her faith in the character of the man who made that promise.

It is here where Gordon-Reed and Onuf make a very important scholarly contribution to how we might synthesize Jefferson’s private and public lives. In their view, France made Jefferson see himself differently. Upon return to the United States, he cast himself as the American man of the Enlightenment, distinguishing himself from other politicians by the virtue of his philosophic bent and yet distinguishing himself from Europeans by making the case for America. Thus he made his home a didactic project, not only a refuge from politics, but also a place where visiting Americans would be pointed to the life of reason. And thus he refined his defense of America in his Notes on the State of Virginia and collected American songs, becoming less attracted to the “ancient traditions of the British isles.” Where the author of the Declaration had once sought to make himself different from other Americans, he now aspired to embody and guide them.

This change in ambition was a transformation of the self, but within a few years it would transform the nation. But before that there was another feature of Jefferson’s change, according to Gordon-Reed and Onuf. Where Jefferson once saw slavery as the central flaw in Virginia, a sin against nature and a problem to be solved, he now “began to adjust his thinking to concentrate instead upon his conduct as the master of Monticello.” This was because slavery had become “domesticated” by his experience in France and because Jefferson had a new understanding of his own ambition. If Gordon-Reed and Onuf are right, it would be hard to overstate the importance of this turn both for the members of Jefferson’s household and for the country.

It has been 18 years, almost a generation by Jefferson’s famous calculation, since DNA evidence confirmed that Thomas Jefferson fathered children with Sally Hemings. Given that Jefferson believed that no generation can have a rightful claim to govern another, it is fitting that Gordon-Reed and Onuf have given us a new and empowering perspective on the private and public life of one of our greatest Americans. It is a book with which the next generation can judge, and be enlightened by, Jefferson’s words and deeds.

Jeremy D. Bailey is author of “Thomas Jefferson and Executive Power”and “James Madison and Constitutional Imperfection.” He is a professor at the University of Houston. Email: books@sfchronicle.com

“Most Blessed of the Patriarchs”

Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of the Imagination

By Annette Gordon-Reed and Peter S. Onuf

(Liveright; 370 pages; $27.95)