Book Review

Canada and the United States

Peter S. Onuf's book is a collection of five essays, an introduction, and an epilogue, all of which have previously been presented either as papers, book chapters, or addresses. All of the chapters represent meditations on Thomas Jefferson's thought and include material on Jefferson's views on the Indians, a republican empire, the Revolution of 1800, the meaning of union, and African Americans and slavery.	1
Despite Jefferson's "generous assessment of the human potential of Indians" as "natural republicans," with a primitive "moral sense of right and wrong" (p. 19), he regarded Native peoples as stuck in a prehistory stage that gave them the bleak alternative of extinction or adopting the culture of white society. Indeed, regardless of his feelings of sympathy and admiration, Jefferson constructed an intellectual rationale for the later removal policy of Andrew Jackson by arguing that Americans had little moral responsibility for the fate of the Indians, given the inevitable progress of civilization and the Indians' own choices.	2
The irony that characterized Jefferson's Indian policy was a constant of the Virginian's thought on many matters of public policy, at least according to Onuf's formulations. Yes, Jefferson was a localist, a loyal Virginian, but because he was "so prosperously and self-confidently situated on the imperial periphery . . . he could envision a republican alternative: an empire without a dominant metropolitan center that would expand across the continent, securing the rights of its member states and spreading its benefits equally" (p. 65). This bifurcated vision of empire "simultaneously served as the unifying, universalizing, nation-making myth for subsequent generations of Americans" as well as "a paradigm for a potentially divisive, increasingly sectionalized, nation-breaking politics" (p. 75).	. . .