Book Review

Anthony F. C. Wallace, professor emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania, is an anthropologist well known to many historians for his work in community studies and ethnohistory. His first book, King of the Delawares: Teedyuscung (1949) was published while he was still a graduate student and only twenty-six years old (three of those years having been spent in the United States Army during World War II). His The Death and Rebirth of the Seneca (1970) remains a classic ethnohistorical study, and Rockdale: The Growth of an American Village in the Early Industrial Revolution (1978) won the Bancroft prize in American history. Now Wallace brings his impressive talents and experience to interpreting Thomas Jefferson's writings, thoughts, and actions vis-à-vis Native Americans.

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Jefferson, of course, is the American enigma, thought by many to personify the nation's ambivalent record and stance on issues of racism, slavery, and freedom. Many years ago, Bernard W. Sheehan's Seeds of Extinction: Jeffersonian Philanthropy and the American Indian (1973) demonstrated how the Jeffersonian generation devastated Indian culture and laid the groundwork for removing eastern Indian peoples beyond the Mississippi River. Wallace focuses on Jefferson the individual, although within the context of evolving United States Indian policies and intensifying assaults on Indian lands and cultures. He attempts to understand and explain a man who was both "the scholarly admirer of Indian character, archaeology, and language" and at the same time "the planner of cultural genocide, the architect of the removal policy, the surveyor of the Trail of Tears."

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