Word: jefferson
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...that is all these sections are: scholarship intended for historians specifically studying Jefferson. That is not meant as an insult. But in a time when historical biographies have become mainstream, nightstand literature—David McCulloch’s 2001 Pulitzer-Prize winning “John Adams” for example—Burstein does not deliver...
...only in the two chapters about Jefferson’s views of slavery and Jefferson’s affair that Burstein’s writing really thrives. Jefferson is portrayed as a political ideologue stuck in a dilemma—on the one hand advocating the equality of all men, and on the other owning slaves and repeatedly expressing no support for abolition efforts in the early nineteenth century...
Burstein does not over-sympathize Jefferson. Instead, the Founding Father is presented as a man who believes that slavery should and will ultimately fail, but also as a man guided by reason who simply believes that there is neither enough public support for, nor any practical means of affecting, abolition at the present time...
This disappoints the reader, and it is supposed to, for we want to see Jefferson buck every trend regarding slavery and be the revolutionary he was in 1776 in the fight for political independence. But this simply was not the case. Burstein admirably examines the president as an objective historian and not as a love-struck biographer...
Unfortunately, even the work’s most compelling section is flawed. Burstein is supposed to be showing us Jefferson through his retirement correspondence. However, in explicating Jefferson’s views towards slavery, Burstein relies overwhelmingly on earlier texts. Jefferson’s opinion on slavery and abolition are most famously documented in his 1785 “Notes on Virginia”—the lack of additional material in the retirement correspondences belies the author’s point that a new Jefferson can be found in these letters...