| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 104.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 104.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Jean M. Yarbrough. American Virtues: Thomas Jefferson on the Character of a Free People. (American Political Thought.) Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. 1998. Pp. xxiv, 256. $35.00.

A study of ideas about character, especially those of a president of the United States, comes at a most propitious time in our history when character has become the most inquired about aspect of contemporary presidential candidates. Jean M. Yarbrough's study of Thomas Jefferson's concerns about character is more than a fresh investigation of Jefferson's ideas: it is in many respects a way to determine whether these ideas are useable in our own time. The results are manifold. Not only has Yarbrough crafted a provocative, occasionally maddening study, but she also brings a much-needed corrective to Jefferson studies, especially to the work of Garry Wills and Richard Matthews and also, to a lesser extent, Lance Banning. 1

Yarbrough argues, for example, that the influence of the Scottish Enlightenment, while clearly discernable in Jefferson's writings, was not as profoundly determining as Wills would have us believe. Nor was Jefferson as radical as Matthews has argued, nor was he a thinker as deeply entrenched in the republican tradition as Banning has suggested. Instead, Yarbrough reveals a Jefferson who was fully a man of his time, an eighteenth-century liberal thinker and writer who believed that a person's character, if formed and nurtured with an appropriate education, could be molded appropriately for the individual to live in a free society. . . .

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