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Cover image for "Most blessed of the patriarchs" : Thomas Jefferson and the empire of the imagination
Format:
Book (regular print)
Title:
"Most blessed of the patriarchs" : Thomas Jefferson and the empire of the imagination
ISBN:
9780871404428
Edition:
First edition.
Publication:
New York : Liveright Publishing Corporation, [2016]
Physical Description:
xxv, 370 pages : illustrations, maps ; 25 cm
Contents:
Introduction: North and South -- Part I. Patriarch. Home ; Plantation ; Virginia -- Part II. "Traveller." France ; Looking Homeward ; Politics -- Part III. Enthusiast. Music ; Visitors ; Privacy and Prayers -- Epilogue.
Summary:
Thomas Jefferson is often portrayed as a hopelessly enigmatic figure -- a riddle -- a man so riven with contradictions that he is almost impossible to know. Lauded as the most articulate voice of American freedom and equality, even as he held people -- including his own family -- in bondage, Jefferson is variably described as a hypocrite, an atheist, or a simple-minded proponent of limited government who expected all Americans to be farmers forever. Now, Annette Gordon-Reed teams up with America's leading Jefferson scholar, Peter S. Onuf, to present a character study that dispels the many clichés that have accrued over the years about our third president. Challenging the widely prevalent belief that Jefferson remains so opaque as to be unknowable, the authors create a portrait of Jefferson, as he might have painted himself, one "comprised of equal parts sun and shadow." Tracing Jefferson's philosophical development from youth to old age, the authors explore what they call the "empire" of Jefferson's imagination -- an expansive state of mind born of his origins in a slave society, his intellectual influences, and the vaulting ambition that propelled him into public life as a modern avatar of the Enlightenment who, at the same time, likened himself to a figure of old -- "the most blessed of the patriarchs." Indeed, Jefferson saw himself as a "patriarch," not just to his country and mountain-like home at Monticello but also to his family, the white half that he loved so publicly, as well as to the black side that he claimed to love, a contradiction of extraordinary historical magnitude.
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