Reviews of Books

Amid the recent outpouring of critical works on Thomas Jefferson, one familiar subject has gotten little notice: foreign relations. And no wonder. There are first the difficulties of navigating an existing, lengthy historiography of American foreign policy dating back more than a century to Henry Adams and the first generation of professional American historians. Second, readers and writers alike have demanded a more complex and thorough examination of Jefferson's private life and public career. As for that public career, scholars have shown a decided preference for the eighteenth century over the nineteenth, the thinker over the policymaker, the politician over the administrator, all of which leave little room for the details of foreign relations.	1
Thomas Jefferson: Westward the Course of Empire stands in stark opposition to these trends. Lawrence Kaplan has written a compelling, accessible book that uses the particular subject of Jefferson's vision of international relations as a means to engage broader questions of politics, policymaking, and ideas. Charting the half century from American Independence to Jefferson's death, Kaplan argues that Jefferson remained keenly attuned to world affairs, regularly attempting to exploit international conditions to realize the specific goals of the United States. Kaplan provides a deft review of the tense relations between the United States and a broad range of potential foreign allies and adversaries ranging from Great Britain, France, and Spain to the Barbary principalities of North Africa and Holland.	2
There is no ambiguity in Kaplan's vision of Jeffersonian statecraft. Jefferson emerges as a fundamentally pragmatic man of tremendous consistency, in goals as well as in strategies. This was the case during Jefferson's sojourn in France, where, Kaplan claims, "stimulating as [the French philosophes'] company was, his [Jefferson's] enthusiasm for their views was restricted to philosophical and political positions that agreed with his own judgments of what would serve American interests" (p. 51). The same pragmatism held true in the 1790s, when Secretary of State Jefferson "was asking for a peacetime equivalent of the League of Armed Neutrals [a short-lived organization created to protect the trading privileges of neutrals during the Revolutionary War]. . . . Yet the idea was neither utopian nor altruistic. It seemed to Jefferson to be the quickest way to free America from British domination" (p. 87). Finally, Kaplan attributes President Jefferson's greatest fiasco in domestic and foreign policy, the Embargo of 1807, less to idealism than to poor practical judgment. "The embargo did not represent a pacifist streak. Jefferson's reluctance to engage in war with one or another of the European belligerents was based on a pragmatic weighing of costs to the nation and recognition of the folly of a declaration of war" (p. 166).	. . .