Review of: Jefferson, Thomas: Writings. New York: Library Classics of America, 1984.

            Thomas Jefferson had perhaps the greatest natural genius of any President of the Untied States. Modestly privileged at his birth, he received a university education (rare in the 18^th century), studied law, apprenticed as a colonial politician, lived as a gentleman farmer, served as one of the nation’s most distinguished statesmen, and retired to a quiet life among his family, his farm, and his library. His interests varied in the fields of agriculture, classical literature, meteorology, anthropology, paleontology, architecture, landscaping, French philosophy, the history of English civil liberties, botany, mineralogy, engineering, music, art, education, and drinking wine. He was perhaps the greatest champion of religious freedom, free expression, free thought, natural rights, and republican government to ever serve as President. Because of the “peculiar institution” of slavery,however, he might also have been the most conflicted and contradictory of the Founding Fathers.

            The Writings of Thomas Jefferson is filled with the many pieces of paper an active and insatiable mind produces in 83 years of life. Jefferson’s pre-revolutionary war essay on The Rights of British America and his post-Yorktown Notes on Virginia were the only two of his extensive writings printed while he lived. Both were originally published without his knowledge. But Jefferson also produced numerous pieces of writing–legislation, messages, addresses, a private autobiography for his family, resolutions and thousands of letters–all of which he copied before carbon paper and left behind in his estate. Every selection in the Writings reveals an intelligence restless in idleness, anxious for ideas, logical, ordered, and expressive. He was an artist with the pen: Clear in the presentation of his thinking on every conceivable subject from self-government by a free people, to the temperature averages at his home at Monticello, to English gardens and a travelogue of Rhine wine-making country.

            There were three things for which Jefferson wanted to be remembered on his simple gravestone: The Declaration of Independence, Virginia’s Statute for Religious Freedom, and founding the University of Virginia. The two pieces of writing particularly show a believer in a higher, divine order, and the Declaration and the Statute are his personal creeds by which he lived until his end.

            Little known is the fact that in the Declaration Jefferson called for the abolition of slavery, a provision deleted from the final document by members of the Continental Congress from the southern colonies. It seemed that Jefferson was never, even to the end of his life, to unburden his conscience as an owner of African slaves. He understood that slaves would never willingly be given up by their masters because of the economic cost to the country due to compensation. He firmly believed that slavery should end, even introducing such a measure as a Virginia colonial legislature several years before 1776. While he believed that education could make such freed slaves self-supporting, he also was convinced that the white and black races could never live together and that therefore upon emancipation freed slaves should have been deported to the Caribbean or back to the African continent.

            The Virginia Statute on Religious Freedom was a measure from Jefferson’s time as Governor late in the Revolutionary War, during the British invasion of the southern states. The principle behind it was the core of Jefferson’s soul, that a person’s communion with the divine, however they chose, was no one else’s business. Convictions and truth, he believed could never be imposed upon an unwilling society except through the compulsion of violence. Jefferson claimed in later letters that he was a Christian in the sense of the teachings of Jesus that reconciled or eliminated the contradictory and unrealistic prescriptions of Judaism in the Old Testament. Jefferson also made his own Bible out of the pasted cut-outs of the direct or paraphrased sayings of Jesus, a text he studied intensely and used to govern his moral convictions. Jefferson never accepted “the rags” of dogma put upon Jesus by those that Jefferson criticized as using the simple message of faith to impose their own greedy control upon the fearing masses.

            After serving as President, perhaps the most important series of personal correspondence in the history of the United States occurred in Jefferson’s reconciliation with his one-time closest friend, and later bitterest rival, John Adams. Brought together through the letters of another Founding Father, the mutual friend Benjamin Rush, Jefferson and Adams lived their last few years knowing that they forgave each other for what each did in believing they were serving the highest interest of the peace and freedom of the country they helped create. Both Adams and Jefferson died within hours of each other on July 4, 1826, the fiftieth anniversary of their signatures to the greatest man-made statement ever written for Liberty.