Journal of Southern History

Thomas Jefferson, Revolutionary: A Radical's Struggle to Remake America by Kevin R. C. Gutzman is not a biography of the famous Founder, nor does it pretend to be. Rather, it offers five critical essays covering significant issues from Thomas Jefferson's public career.

Chapter 1 describes Jefferson's desire to be viewed, during his life and after, as a lawgiver; "Historically, lawgivers—authors of constitutions—were considered the greatest of politicians" (p. 25). Gutzman pays particular attention to Jefferson's definition of federalism, which—no doubt to the confusion of undergraduates everywhere—Jefferson saw as a "limitation on federal power" (p. 9). While the notion that Jefferson preferred strict limits on federal government does not qualify as news, Gutzman provides a coherent sketch of historical events, before and after 1776, that influenced Jefferson's commitment to relatively small government. Whether one agrees with Jefferson's position, or the author's lauding of it, Gutzman's prose is admirably clear and coherent. Unfortunately, this first chapter veers furthest into hagiography, often at the expense of Jefferson's rivals. Earlyin the book, Gutzman refers to Jefferson as the "author" of the Declaration of [End Page 953] Independence (p. 26). Terms such as editor or draftsman, which Pauline Maier uses to describe Jefferson in American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence (New York, 1997), would clearly be more accurate given the collective nature of the work. Gutzman offers that John Adams would have drafted the Declaration of Independence "[h]ad he known what great repute its author would earn" (p. 26). More egregiously, Gutzman dismisses John Quincy Adams's post-presidency career as an antislavery congressman as a "resentful" man's "revenge upon the mainly southern politicians who had seen to it that he was not reelected" (p. 92).

Chapter 2 traces Jefferson's and James Madison's long struggle to convince Virginia's legislators, who were facing a hostile clergy, to ensure religious freedom in the state; it also examines Jefferson's famous presidential letter to the Danbury Baptist Association. Gutzman's detailed discussion is an admirable attempt to get inside Jefferson's thought process. In chapter 3, the author begins with the importance of not viewing the Founders as "secular saints," and then scolds the Democratic Party leadership in several states for dropping Jefferson's name from their annual Jefferson-Jackson fund-raising dinners in 2015 (p. 125). (In fairness, Jackson's name should probably be as toxic as Jefferson's.) There is also a bizarre reference to Harry S. Truman's criticism of desegregating the military without mentioning that Truman eventually did just that. While dissecting Jefferson's antislavery efforts, which Jefferson considered inextricable from colonization, the author suggests that Jefferson abandoned his typical scientific rigor in his views on race. Even more disheartening, when Jefferson became the executor of Tadeusz Kościuszko's will, he failed utterly to enact its provisions, which included freeing and providing land for some American slaves.

The shortest chapter, "Assimilation," correspondingly lacks the detail and depth of the other chapters. It largely eschews the actual practice of Jefferson's Indian policy on the ground. It is hard to argue, however, with Gutzman's conclusion: "Just as American principles yielded to American practice in regard to the Indian, so did Thomas Jefferson's" (p. 194). Jefferson's promotion of public education and his thoughts on the survey and sale of western lands—briefly discussed in this volume—might have been his most revolutionary stances. The struggle to build and fund a true university and hire mainly secular scholars might well be Jefferson's greatest achievement. Even this, Gutzman concedes, was spurred partly by the Missouri Crisis and Jefferson's fear that southern boys needed a school other than radical, abolitionist-leaning Harvard University.

It is doubtful that Thomas Jefferson, Revolutionary will...