Volume 28, Number 13 · August 13, 1981
The Disappointments of Jefferson
By Gordon S. Wood
The Sage of Monticello Volume Six of "Jefferson and His Time"
by Dumas Malone
Little, Brown, 551 pp., $19.95
Thomas Jefferson as a person scarcely seems to exist. He seems to be mainly a symbol, a touchstone, of what we as a people are, someone invented, manipulated, turned into something revealing about ourselves. Surely no figure in our history embodies so much of our democratic heritage and so many of our democratic hopes. Jefferson has virtually become America itself. 'If Jefferson was wrong,' wrote James Parton, our first professional biographer, 'America is wrong. If America is right, Jefferson was right.'
Review, 2677 words
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