American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson
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For a man who insisted that life on the public stage was not what he had in mind, Thomas Jefferson certainly spent a fantastic deal of time in the spotlight–and not only during his active political career. After 1809, his longed-for retirement was compromised by a steady stream of guests and tourists who made of his estate at Monticello a virtual hotel, as well as by more than one thousand letters per year, most from strangers, which he insisted on answering personally. In his twilight years Jefferson was already taking on the luster of a national icon, which was polished off by his auspicious death (on July 4, 1896); and in the subsequent seventeen decades of his celebrity–now verging, thanks to virulent revisionists and television documentaries, on notoriety–has been inflated beyond recognition of the original person.
For the historian Joseph J. Ellis, the experience of writing about Jefferson was ”as if a pathologist, just about to start an autopsy, has learned that the body on the operating table was still breathing.” In American Sphinx, Ellis sifts the facts shrewdly from the legends and the rumors, treading a path between vilification and hero worship in order to formulate a plausible portrait of the man who still today ”hover[s] over the political scene like one of persons dirigibles cruising above a crowded football stadium, flashing words of inspiration to both teams.” For, at the grass roots, Jefferson is no longer liberal or conservative, agrarian or industrialist, pro- or anti-slavery, privileged or populist. He is all things to all people. His own obliviousness to incompatible convictions within himself (which left him deaf to most forms of irony) has leaked out into the world at large–a world determined to idolize him despite his foibles.
From Ellis we learn that Jefferson sang relentlessly under his breath; that he delivered only two public speeches in eight years as president, while spending ten hours a day at his writing desk; that sometimes his political sensibilities collided with his domestic agenda, as when he ordered an expensive piano from London during a boycott (and pledged to ”keep it in storage”). We see him relishing such projects as the nailery at Monticello that allowed him to interact with his slaves more palatably, as pseudo-employer to pseudo-employees. We grow convinced that he preferred to meet his lovers in the rarefied region of his mind rather than in the actual bedchamber. We watch him exhibiting both fantastic depth and fantastic shallowness, combining massive learning with extraordinary naïveté, piercing insights with self-deception on the grandest scale. We know why we should neither beatify him nor consign him to the rubbish heap of history, though we are by no means required to stop loving him. He is Thomas Jefferson, after all–our very own sphinx.Amazon.com Review
Well timed to coincide with Ken Burns’s documentary (on which the leader served as a consultant), this new biography doesn’t aim to displace the many massive tomes about America’s third president that already weigh down bookshelves. As a replacement for, as suggested by the subtitle–”The Character of Thomas Jefferson”–Ellis searches for the “living, breathing person” bottom the icon and tries to elucidate his actual beliefs. Jefferson’s most ardent admirers may find this perspective too critical, but Ellis’s portrait of a complex, sometimes devious man who both sought and abhorred power has the ring of truth.
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I am a well educated person with a particular interest in Jefferson. I was amazed at the assertion by Ellis that Jefferson formed the republican party. The republican party was not customary until 1854. The party the Jefferson formed evolved into the democratic party. Are we living in the soviet union now? if you don’t like real history you just change it. How do I get my money back on his piece of crap book? I knew this guy has a history of stretching the truth but I didn’t know it went this far!
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
Joseph J. Ellis is a noted Pulitzer Prize winning leader, so obviously many readers will disagree with my assessment of AMERICAN SPHINX: THE CHARACTER OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. While I did learn things here about TJ that additional authors passed over, I can’t really say I learned anything of fantastic weight.
When reading Founding Brothers, for which Ellis won the aforementioned Pulitzer, I establish the book painfully slow, but gradually building momentum. That book improved with each chapter (or theme, if you will). I started reading this one and establish it too to be painfully slow. The difference is, this one remained so to the end, save the last 10 or so pages. Perhaps that was simply my own induced enthusiasm at reaching the end.
I’ve establish Ellis’s books to be to some extent like walking through a plowed meadow after a hard rain. You’ll get there eventually, but you’ll have to stop and rest along the way and will be exhausted when you reach the additional side.
There are things to learn here, and the TJ enthusiast will want to read this, but for my money, there are countless additional volumes available that blow this one away. For me, the highpoint of this volume is the colossal 40 page bibliography.
Reader’s Rating: 3 / 5
The Boston Globe has exposed Mr. Ellis as a liar for his fabrications about his non-service in Vietnam, his bogus tales of civil rights protests in the South, bogus accounts of playing high school football and fabrications of helping David Halberstand with his book.
Ellis never served in Vietnam and he smeared Thomas Jefferson with bogus claims. He tarnishes the excellent name of men who really fought and died in Vietnam. Disgraceful. Avoid anything written by this man.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
Ellis has a problem. He makes claims that he can’s support, and he makes claims that are inconsistent. To borrow one of his techniques, he writes like a pathological liar. He seems to forget what he has said from page to page or even from the start of a paragraph to the end – more interested in calling attention to himself than he is to the truth. I admit the pattern. I was a pathological liar once.
Here are some examples. On the last paragraph of page 87 (paperback edition), he claims that Jefferson had compartmentalized conflicting beliefs. That may be the case, but the rest of the paragraph is poor evidence at best.
On the bottom of 123 he says that Jefferson’s remarks on ratification were inconsistent and contradictory. The evidence? He changed his mind about the timing of support: oppose after 9 states ratify to force a bill of rights, and later oppose from the beginning to force a boll of rights. What a flip-flop. I’m shocked.
I don’t have the page now but he’s says that Jefferson withdrew into an emotional shell when Martha died to protect himself from future hurt. Then a few pages later he describes Jefferson’s intimate relationship with the Adams family tree, and then his heads-over-heels crush on a young woman in Paris.
I’m suspicious of the way he footnotes. He starts a paragraph with a few quotes from Jefferson’s correspondence. Then he psychoanalyzes Jefferson extensively building claims that aren’t supported by the quotes, and then ends the paragraph with a footnote. The footnote gives the citation for the quotes early in the paragraph but is mum on his interpretation.
A couple more. The first paragraph pn page 137. He quotes a letter from Madison. Some of the quote is in italics added by Ellis to indicate coded language lacking adage how he knows what words are coded or where he establish the key to decode the language. It reminds me of the movie, A Beuatiful Mind. He uses the coded language to state that Jefferson expected to retire and return to Paris. Wow.
I’m on page 190; it’s 1797 or there abouts. Ellis is claiming that Jefferson is coming out of retirement to solve the nation’s debt problem because he can’t solve his own debt problem. What hogwash. Mr. Ellis, there are a heap of additional explanations. Perhaps, Jefferson’s financial problems made him acutely aware of the problems debt represented to the nation. He wasn’t entering public life to duck the problem of his private debt. Agreed the acerbic mood at the time, entering public life would make it harder to confront his own debt demon.
That’s enough for now. I will continue reading because I told my nephew, a history student, that I would. Keeping ones word is such a burden.
Reader’s Rating: 2 / 5
I have read reasonably a few slow books but this really tops it off. It is a slow and dull book. Ellis describes Jefferson, an American hero, as featureless as Fiber One.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5