Thomas Jefferson: (The American Presidents Series) |
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Thomas Jefferson: (The American Presidents Series)
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by Joyce Appleand Arthur M. Schlesinger
Sales Rank: 79278
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Discount: 32 %
List Price: $22.00
$14.96
At Amazon
on 4-14-2008.
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Features
Cover Type: Hard Cover with 208 pages
Published by: Times Books; First Edition edition February 1, 2003
Written in: English
ISBN 10 Number: 0805069240
ISBN 13 Number: 978-0805069242
Book Dimensions:
8.2 x 5.8 x 0.8 inches
Weighs: 12.6 ounces
From Publishers Weekly
Thomas Jefferson, so multifaceted and long-lived, tries the skills of most who venture to write his biography, especially a short one like this. But UCLA historian Appleby (Inheriting the Revolution: The First Generation of Americans) has succeeded in writing as good a brief study of this complex man as is imaginable. Another in a series on the American chief executives edited by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., her elegant book is a liberal's take on the complex, sphinxlike founder of American liberalism. Appleby convincingly argues that the third president's greatest legacies were limited government (breached, however, by the opportunism that characterized his own presidency) and the great expansion of democracy. If some of her criticisms of Jefferson seem more perfunctory than heartfelt, she fully explains the man's sorry record and tortured views on Slavery and race. Providing along the way a short, up-to-date History of the early 19th-century nation, she also concisely surveys the day's great issues-voting, democracy, political parties, commerce, westering and religion. Yet such a balanced picture of Jefferson remains somehow unsatisfactory, no doubt because a man of so many contradictions slips away from every biographer, the tensions in the man mirroring those of his times. Appleby tries to toss a bouquet to the man who vanquished the Federalist Party and purchased the Louisiana Territory. She wants to convince us that Jefferson was "one of history's most intuitive politicians," but even in Appleby's capable hands, Jefferson remains the most unfathomable political figure in our history.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
Jefferson's tarnished reputation receives a slight boost in Appleby's interpretation of his presidency, part of a series about the presidents that includes Robert Remini's great John Quincy Adams [BKL Jl 02]. Appleby analyzes Jefferson's belief that his election in 1800 was comparable to 1776 in revolutionary import, a task she embarks on through extended comparison with the outlook of the Federalist whom Jefferson and the Republicans ousted. After the tumults of the 1780s, which in part motivated the formulation of the new Constitution, the Federalists regarded themselves as having rescued America from democratic excess. More optimistic about human nature, Jefferson was unworried by democracy--for white men, at least--and his presidency has proved enduringly interesting, significant, and contradictory; hence the oscillations of his reputation. Appleby fluidly unites evidence and argument not just to narrate Jefferson's eight years in office but to persuade readers of the importance of the democratic example he set. Hers is a fine, expert brief on the controversies surrounding, as Joseph Ellis memorably titled his biography, the American Sphinx. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Reader Reviews
Few American presidents have experienced such a fluctuating reputation as president as has Thomas Jefferson. To a large extent this is also because of his pivotal role in the creation of the American republic. His contributions are by any standard vast: principal author of The Declaration of Independence, governor of Virginia during the Revolutionary War, ambassador to France following the War, first Secretary of State, second Vice President, third President, creator of the American party system (as well as of the old Republican party, that ironically evolved into the Democratic party under the leadership of Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren), and author of a host of documents that have become part of the heart of American political literature. He is also viewed as the principal founder of liberalism in the United States, and is usually contrasted with John Adams, who is perceived as the founder of conservativism (though I personally find that Adams has virtually nothing in common with contemporary conservativism, which has less and less to do with Burkean ideals and concerns). This biography of Jefferson is by Joyce Appleby, one of the most renowned and respected of contemporary historians of the American Revolution and the early republic. In recent years many historians have taken aim at Jefferson to provide unflattering portraits, based either on the mercurial or inconsistent nature of his personality, the hypocrisy of his years as Adams's vice president, or his complex relations to slavery in general and Sally Hemmings in particular. Appleby does not want to ignore the very troubling aspects of Jefferson's career, especially on slavery--and who would want to, since to do so would be to tacitly endorse the "particular institution"--but she definitely wants to remind her readers both of why Jefferson is one of our greatest presidents and of his central role in fashioning some of the finest aspects of American society and political life. It cannot be emphasized strongly enough that Appleby has written a biography that is intended to serve as a corrective to the work of historians like Joseph J. Ellis, who in books like AMERICAN SPHINX, FOUNDING BROTHERS, and PASSIONATE SAGE has been intensely critical of Jefferson on a host of grounds (indeed, Ellis portrays him as a bit of a hypocritical nutcase). Also, with a number of books that have rehabilitated John Adams, it has been inevitable that he be played off Jefferson in a way that is a bit more flattering to Adams than perhaps ought to be the case. The negative reviews of this book are, as a result, utterly incomprehensible. What to make of them? I'm not sure if the one-star reviewers haven't read this biography, or if they haven't read anything else about Jefferson. Several criticize this book for being "PC," whatever that means. Appleby points out that Jefferson remained a slaveholder despite thinking it was evil, that he consistently denigrated women in his writings, and that he very possibly had a complex relationship with Sally Hemmings. Could any good biographer ignore these issues? Would any civilized individual claim that Jefferson's positions can be defended? Of course not. More to the point, has any competent biographer ignored these issues? Did Ellis? Did Dumas Malone? These same reviewers assert that Appleby "bashes" Jefferson. Clearly, they are utterly ignorant of the greater literature on Jefferson and the Revolution. This is unquestionably a very positive portrait of Jefferson. She praises him despite his questionable views on slavery. In fact, my major complaint with the book is that she doesn't deal sufficiently with a host of actions in his life that are extremely dubious morally. For instance, he was not only the most disloyal vice president in American history, he persistently aided those journalists who savagely attacked Adams, and even assisted in one book that made scurrilous attacks on Adams's morals, all while denying to Adams's face that he was doing any of these things. As readers of other biographies of Jefferson are aware, he had a remarkable capacity for self-justifying some very dubious actions. He was a master of "the ends justifies the means" thinking. Appleby largely skirts over this, perhaps because of her limited amount of space, perhaps because she wants to emphasize his positive accomplishments instead. Primarily, Appleby wants to explain how the American political system is essentially Jeffersonian through its very core. His insistence on a government by the people and for the people (Lincoln was in many ways the foremost Jeffersonian to follow in his footsteps)--as opposed to a patriarchal and powerful central government with an aristocracy making decisions for the many--won the war for the political heart of America. In other words, he was the author for the populism that has always since remained the great ideal of American politics, even if it has sometimes been subverted. His notions of equality of opportunity, of trusting the masses rather than the few, of stressing the general will over the particular will have become lock, stock, and barrel of American political life. She wants to show that America is essentially Jefferson in its very soul. Because most of her work has been done on the intellectual history of the Revolution, she portrays this as a struggle of ideas. All in all, I think she does a masterful job of showing why Jefferson is one of our most crucial presidents. The book is not without flaws, though its flaws are never noted in the one and two star reviews found below, which all bizarrely and surreally criticize the book because it supposedly makes Jefferson look bad. In fact, in her attempt to make Jefferson good, she sometimes makes the Federalists look worse than they ought. For instance, she never sharply distinguishes between Adams and the Federalists, let alone Adams and Hamilton, Adam hating and detesting Hamilton far more than Jefferson ever did. She often writes as if Adams and Hamilton were of one mind. Furthermore, she repeats some caricatures of the past, such as the one that Adams engaged in a host of "midnight" judicial appointments, though biographers such as Paige Smith, McCullough, and Ellis have shown that in fact these appointments had been made over the course of weeks and months, and not on a single eve. She is too good of an historian to have made such a simple mistake. At the very least she should have indicated why the caricature is correct and Adams's biographers wrong. I find the positions of many of the Federalists to be complex to sum up as neatly as she has done here. I would heartily recommend that anyone reading this book read it in conjunction with John Patrick Diggins biography of Adams from the same series. They say that history is written by the winners, but this is a case where the outcome is still in question. Adams and Jefferson represent two great, ongoing traditions in American life. Diggins sees more virtue in Adams and more vice in Jefferson than is plausible, and much the same can be said of Appleby's opposite portrait. But anyone wanting to read this book can rest assured that this is a first rate brief biography, one that wants to praise Jefferson, not merely bash him.
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Thomas Jefferson: (The American Presidents Series)
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