Jefferson could be painted touch by touch, with a fine pencil, and the perfection of the likeness depended upon the shifting and uncertain flicker of its semi-transparent shadows.” Jefferson’s most authoritative living biographer, historian Merrill Peterson, spent more than 30 years pursuing his subject and still was forced to make the “mortifying confession” that “Jefferson remains for me, finally, an impenetrable man.”Īlthough there are a crop of recent biographies of Jefferson, along with the standard, hagiographic studies by Dumas Malone and Peterson, we have long needed the kind of book that Ellis has written.

Henry Adams-whose insights into Jefferson’s career as secretary of state and president remain unmatched-described over a century ago the difficulty of capturing Jefferson when he noted that “a few broad strokes of the brush would paint the portraits of all the early presidents with this exception. Jefferson was riddled with ambiguities and contradictions he was an exquisitely complicated man.

Rather than focus on such chewed-over subjects as Jefferson’s racial attitudes, Ellis concentrates on Jefferson’s character, which he nicely defines as “the animating principles that informed his private and public life.” Historian Joseph Ellis, who previously wrote an admiring study of Jefferson’s political enemy John Adams, has in “American Sphinx” delivered a far more subtle but nevertheless damning blow to Jefferson’s already battered reputation. Fifty-six years ago, Jefferson was, according to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, America’s “Apostle of Freedom,” and today liberal commentator Michael Lind likens him to Strom Thurmond, disparaging him as a “Southern reactionary.” Irish journalist and diplomat Conor Cruise O’Brien calls him America’s “spellbinding and anarchic racist prophet.” They have criticized his stance on issues ranging from civil liberties to states’ rights to the French Revolution and have, above all, castigated him for his pseudo-scientific racism and his belief that there was no place for free black people in American society. Over the past 25 years historians and pundits have attacked Thomas Jefferson on several fronts.

American Sphinx by Joseph J. Ellis