Thomas Jefferson | R. B. Bernstein

Thomas Jefferson | R. B. Bernstein | An excellent synopsis of Jefferson's legacy

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Thomas Jefferson

	Thomas Jefferson R. B. Bernstein Oxford University Press, USA, 2005 - 288 pages average customer review:based on 39 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

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A wonderful read for any fan of the era. With it's shortness of pages you don't get bogged down in mundane minutia. It's an excellent first book for those interested in Thomas Jefferson, or a good re-cap for those who've read other works on this great Founding Father.

An excellent synopsis of Jefferson's legacy

In less than 200 pages, R.B. Bernstein summarizes the major events of Jefferson's life, gives careful treatment to the various controversies surrounding Jefferson, and places his legacy and context. The book takes Jefferson's writings seriously and attempts to explain the many seeming contradictions. With a very small investment of time, a reader will earn a strong, introductory grasp of what Jefferson accomplished and stood for.

The book reflects the current state of thought of Jefferson, which is less adulatory than previous generations. This Jefferson is not that of Dumas Malone, who merited six volumes of biographical treatment. Bernstein judges Jefferson harshly in certain areas, particularly his Presidency, which was a faillure apart from the Louisiana Purchase and the Lewis and Clark expedition.

I suspect it is this treatment that has earned this book severe ratings from those who dislike the current scholarly view of Jefferson. Still, Bernstein strives for fairness, and he closes by acknowleding the importance that Jefferson's Declaration of Independence has had on the course of world events.

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The Power of Ideals

This is the first book that I've read about Jefferson, my knowledge of this Founding Father to date having come from high school and college courses and an occasional newspaper article. This compact, well-written biography makes for a compelling read and, for me, clearly whetted my appetite to find out more about what made this oratorically-challenged man of ideals tick.

The portrait painted of Jefferson is an interesting, occasionally troubling one, that of a man somewhat thin-skinned, who would suffer what he considered fools in silence rather than open his mouth, who didn't have (in today's vernacular) "the fire in the belly" for politics and trembled while delivering his inaugural address, and whose conduct with two married women was at best questionable. He was a man who could trot out the theory of nullification when affronted by a politically-charged Federalist edict (The Alien and Sedition Acts), a brilliant diplomat who never quite learned how to temper his correspondence and paid for it, a man whose political philosophy ran so deep that it ended up robbing him temporarily of a friendship with another Founder, and one who built his legacy around the common man but bristled at what the common man was doing to shine the light of liberty in Paris simply because he was so personally and deeply grounded in the Virginia countryside.

Then, of course, there are the conflicting acts and views that Jefferson took with regard to race. He stated that "All men are created equal", yet expounded upon what he saw as the inherent differences between two races that could never be reconciled within the same republic. His relations with Sally Hemings appear to extend from his view of her as property. As part of the Territorial Ordinance, he proposed, unsuccessfully, that all lands won from Britain in the Revolutionary War be off-limits to slavery, yet according to Bernstein, during the debate on The Missouri Compromise argued forcefully against that accommodation in terms of the sovereign powers of the individual states, "...each of which would regulate its own affairs, including the decisions whether to accept or reject slavery in joining the Union, or to preserve or abolish slavery thereafter."

Bernstein's work is a riveting read about America's greatest Founding Father, the one who gave the most eloquent voice to the colonists' hopes and dreams, who unlike some of his contemporaries clearly saw the American experiment as something to be exported, and who, through several of his acts as president, set in motion a seemingly endless debate about the meaning of The Constitution and when and how it should be interpreted as America grows and changes.

Bernstein's "Thomas Jefferson" is not the last word on the author of The Declaration, but it is a wonderful place to begin.

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Thomas Jefferson

I liked this book I haven't read any other books on Jefferson but I enjoyed this one. It was recommended by another reviewer as the best one he had read so I decided to try it and I was not disappointed. I've enjoyed reading it and learning more about the person who was Thomas Jefferson.

A well-written overview

THOMAS JEFFERSON by R.B. Bernstein is a short biography (198 pages) of Thomas Jefferson that seems to accurately sketch our third president's life objectively, but it reads a little like a long encyclopedia article, without much verve or access to the emotional and personal presence of the man.

This characterization is not to fault Bernstein, who has done what he stated in his introduction was his aim. I found the book enjoyable and his objectivity refreshing in terms of both Jefferson's strengths (his ability to write and inspire) and his weaknesses (his behind-the-scenes manipulations that often ended up embarrassing him when his differing letters were compared by their recipients). I also found the epilogue ("Take care of me when dead..."), which delineates the various eras of Jefferson's reputation in America, very interesting.

Bernstein organizes the book's chapters chronologically by logical periods in the life of Jefferson, from his young adulthood in Virginia (1743-1774) through his time in Europe (1874-1789) to his presidential administrations (1801-1805 and 1805-1809) and his retirement (1809-1826). Bernstein quotes from Jefferson's writings and from peers who wrote about him, including an interesting physical description of him by Sen. Daniel Webster.

While this book does not present nearly so engaging and personal a portrait of a man as Ellis's book on Washington and McCullough's book on John Adams, it does continue the story of the beginnings of our nation from Jefferson's life and reinforces the point that these man, while very different from each other, were inextricably linked with intertwining lives and experiences. I learned a lot about the beginnings of the United States from this book, including some interesting explanations of the electoral college ("In 1787-1788, when the Constitution was adopted, most Americans expected most presidential elections to give no candidate a majority. The electoral college would thin the field, not decide the election. ... Thus, in 1800 they were alarmed by a deadlock that, in 1788, they would have expected as a normal result" p. 129) that illustrate how fluid and changing governance was even for those who began our systems and protocols. It is also a helpful volume in understanding Jefferson's religious life, his deistic beliefs and his adamant support of separation of church and state and the criticism he endured for this position.

If anything, this book has made me more curious about Jefferson, his legacy and his personal life, as it really does gloss Jefferson's marriage, the fact that only one of his children survived him and his relationship with Sally Hemmings and their children. I recommend this as a primer, but not for greater insight into the man.

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