| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

"I Tremble for My Country": Thomas Jefferson and the Virginia Gentry. By Ronald L. Hatzenbuehler. (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2006. xii, 206 pp. $55.00, ISBN 0-8130-3007-2.)

The legacy of Thomas Jefferson has fallen on hard times. From Leonard Levy's Jefferson and Civil Liberties (1963) to Fawn Brodie's Thomas Jefferson (1974) to John Chester Miller's The Wolf by the Ears (1977) to Joseph Ellis's acclaimed American Sphinx (1997), much attention has focused on Jefferson's position on human rights and slavery, and on his carnal relationship with his slave Sally Hemings. These accusations (substantiated by dna evidence) were made the centerpiece of scholarship suggesting that Jefferson was inconsistent in his principles, unconscionable in his ethics, and questionable in his administrative policies. Only Richard Matthews's brilliantly original The Radical Politics of Thomas Jefferson (1984) has sought to portray a more sympathetic, and more radical, image of Jefferson. For most of the past generation, the legacy of Jefferson seems not to have been as the democratic author of the Declaration of Independence, but rather, as the slave master of Monticello and as American hypocrite. This problematic line of attack leaves us stuck with an image of inconsistencies and immoralities as personal failings of this American icon. Opportunities to draw larger lessons about how America confronts choices that challenge fundamental social institutions seem lost in studies that concentrate too narrowly on individual character, behavior, and philosophical uniformity.

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