American Sphinx Read Online Free PDF Page B

accomplished. The love affair that continued to flourish in the public domain had encountered some rough patches in the academic world; indeed, in some scholarly precincts it had turned quite sour. Once the symbol of all that was right with America, Jefferson had become the touchstone for much that was wrong.
    You could look back and, with the advantage of hindsight, locate the moment when the tide began to turn in the 1960s. In 1963 Leonard Levy published
Jefferson and Civil Liberties: The Darker Side,
which, as its title announced, found Jefferson’s record as a liberal defender of minority rights less than inspiring and his rhetoric about freedom of speech and freedom of the press often at odds with his actions. But an even bigger blow fell in 1968 with the publication of Winthrop Jordan’s
White over Black,
a magisterial reappraisal of race relations in early America featuring a long section on Jefferson. While hardly a heavy-handed indictment of Jefferson, Jordan’s book argued that racism had infiltrated the American soul very early in our history and that Jefferson provided the most resonant illustration of the way deep-seated racist values were buried within the folds of the white man’s personality. 14
    Jordan adopted an agnostic attitude toward the allegations of a sexual liaison with Sally Hemings but, while not endorsing the Sally stories, depicted a Jefferson whose deepest feelings toward blacks had their origins in primal urges that, like the sex drive, came from deep within his subconscious. Many other scholarly books soon took up related themes, but
White over Black
set the terms of the debate about the centrality of race and slavery in any appraisal of Jefferson. Once that became a chief measure of Jefferson’s character, his stock was fated to fall in the scholarly world.
    Another symptom of imminent decline—again, all this in retrospect—was an essay in 1970 by Eric McKitrick reviewing the recent biographies of Jefferson by Dumas Malone and Merrill Peterson. McKitrick had the temerity to ask whether it might not be time to declare a moratorium on the celebratory approach toward Jefferson. McKitrick asked: “What about those traits of character that aren’t heroic from any angle?”—traits that went beyond the obvious complicity with slavery. What about his very un-Churchillian performance as governor of Virginia during the American Revolution, when he failed to mobilize the militia and had to flee Monticello on horseback ahead of the marauding British Army? What about the fiasco of his American Embargo of 1807, when he clung to the illusion that economic sanctions would keep us out of war even after it was abundantly clear that they only devastated the American economy? 15
    From the perspective at Charlottesville, these were impertinent, if not downright hostile, questions. Dumas Malone, the quintessential grand old man of Jefferson scholarship, had toiled for most of his long life, much of that time on the campus at the University of Virginia, to create his authoritative six-volume biography
Jefferson and His Time,
one of the great labors of love in American scholarship. Merrill Peterson’s scholarly renderings of Jefferson were only slightly less heroic. Now McKitrick was saying that the insights available from the Charlottesville perspective, what he called “the view from Jefferson’s camp,” had just about exhausted their explanatory power.
    Rather amazingly it was in Charlottesville that the scholarly reappraisal of Jefferson that McKitrick had called for reached a crescendo. It happened in October 1992, when the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation convened a conference under the apparently reverential rubric “Jeffersonian Legacies.” The result was a spirited exchange—one reporter called it “an intellectual free-for-all”—that went on for six days. The conference spawned a collection of fifteen essays published in record time by the University Press of Virginia, an hour-long