HIS MASTERLY PEN

The literary prowess of a Founding Father.

As he did in Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer, Kaplan examines the life and thought of Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) through an astute reading of his copious writings. Jefferson, he notes, “was a superb writer, with a genius particularly suited to his needs as a Virginia legislator, wartime propagandist, governor, Congressional delegate, secretary of state, vice president, president, and the premier intellectual, cultural, and moral voice of the republic he helped create and then lived in for fifty years.” Trained as a lawyer, Jefferson found the practice of law “intellectually thin and repetitive” and became immersed, instead, in the Colonies’ political fortunes. In 1774, his A Summary View of the Rights of British America “put Jefferson’s name on the transatlantic map,” and the text served as a template for his crafting the Declaration of Independence. That powerful document, reflecting the views of the incipient nation’s elite leaders, “was to be philosophy, argument, and propaganda combined and raised to the highest level of political literature. Its purpose was to help make and change history.” Jefferson navigated through tumultuous times, partisan dissent, war, and the fraught matter of slavery. He claimed to abhor slavery “in principle,” yet he “still defined slaves as property” and kept hundreds of enslaved people as “his irreplaceable labor force.” He also believed that freed slaves and Whites could never coexist. He advocated limited government, a priority on agriculture, and fiscal economy, in sharp conflict with Federalists such as Washington and Hamilton. Certainly, his political views are more easily discerned than personal revelations. Even in the memoirs he began late in life, or even in epistolary flirtations, “secrecy and repression in regard to private matters were hallmarks of Jefferson’s personality.” Among those private matters were his feelings for his wife, who died in 1782, and his mistress Sally Hemings. Kaplan smoothly combines analysis of Jefferson’s rhetorical strategies with an authoritative portrayal of his world.

A sensitive probing of a complex man.