‘Remembering Jefferson: Who He Was, Who We Are’
By Mary E. Stuckey
University Press of Kansas, 216 Pages

Thomas Jefferson was an elusive, contradictory person. He was sort of against slavery, and he sort of wasn’t. He extolled limited government, then purchased Louisiana — doubling the size of the nation and concomitantly the central government’s responsibilities. He was wary of banks and big cities, though he had a wild time at Paris. He made a deal with a political foe, New Yorker Alexander Hamilton, supporting a federal government that assumed the states’ debts so long as the national capital would be seated at that undeveloped swamp of Washington, D.C.

The first Jefferson biographers, as Mary E. Stuckey explains, stuck close to his roles as author of the Declaration of Independence and proponent of the cause of liberty. That view of him, as Ms Stuckey also shows, remains a staple of children’s biographies, though some of them now take a more nuanced approach as they grapple with his slaveholder legacy.

Ms. Stuckey’s book stands out because she is not simply concerned with book-length biographies. Not only does she conduct a revealing survey of the children’s literature on the third president, she carefully examines the import of public memorials of all kinds as well as movies, television dramas, and plays — most notably the hugely successful “Hamilton.”

Ms. Stuckey is quite even-handed and acutely aware of how difficult it is to portray Jefferson in the round. Does his slaveholding, for example, enter the first sentence of his biography, or is it treated as a sidebar, as one of the children’s biographers handles it? The public fears, as Ms. Stuckey points out, that its version of Jefferson will be erased if a statue is taken down or moved to another location that “contextualizes” his life.  

How does a children’s biography introduce not only slavery but the fraught subject of Jefferson’s relationship with his slave Sally Hemings? For those parents concerned about how Jefferson may be taught in schools, which books their children should read, “Remembering Thomas Jefferson” is required reading because it shows just how complex issues can be handled in literature for children and young adults.

Whatever choice the biographer, historian, memorialist, novelist, or dramatist makes, some vital aspect of Jefferson is likely to be omitted or downplayed, especially since how the past is depicted depends very much on the cultural moment in which he is celebrated or censured. Ms. Stuckey is concerned about films like “Jefferson in Paris” that posit a romance between Hemings and her master, as if to suggest that maybe slavery was not that bad, or at least that Jefferson had a heart. 

It puzzles me that Ms. Stuckey does not deal with Barbara Chase-Riboud’s excellent novel, “Sally Hemings.” That there may have been some kind of love between Jefferson and Hemings the novel does not gainsay, but at the same time it imagines the behavior of both parties — Hemings’s ambivalent feelings about Jefferson as lover and master, and Jefferson’s obtuse or deliberate refusal to confront the implications of owning human beings.

As Ms. Stuckey notes, Jefferson is a difficult subject because a reckoning with his manifest inconsistencies has come so late into the public discussion of him. For example, we can only go back to 1974, when Fawn Brodie published a controversial “intimate” biography of Jefferson, taking seriously the African American oral tradition that he had fathered several Hemings children.  

Prominent biographers like Dumas Malone and Joseph Ellis doubted that Jefferson had engaged in miscegenation, even as Annette Gordon-Reed’s “Thomas Jefferson: An American Controversy” (1998) did a forensic demolition of the biographical tradition that tried to shuffle Sally Hemings into the salacious lore and legend fomented by his political enemies.

Then came the DNA analysis the next year that made it virtually certain that Jefferson fathered at least some of the Hemings children. Pick up any Jefferson biography written in the last decade or so and Hemings has been incorporated as one of the fundamental aspects of Jefferson’s life.

By the way, Jefferson did not purchase Louisiana from Napoleon. What Jefferson acquired, Ms. Stuckey says, was the right to negotiate with the indigenous peoples already on that land. Recognizing that basic fact, she observes, also shows just how skewed accounts of America’s founding have been.

Mr. Rollyson’s forthcoming book is “Making the American Presidency: How Biographers Shape History.”