is the second volume of Malones six volume biography of Jefferson, It is, as you may imagine, very detailed and well written given the style of its period.
Its main weaknesses are a reluctance to violate Jeffersons privacy a four month gap in the biography duringis stated to be a period in which he was engaged in personal matters and family illnesses, and his partisanship in regard to Jeffersons political battles.
He does not seem to feel that a biographer and historian needs to strive for objectivity, Book is old now Hamilton is a traitor, Jefferson is noble, The book does a great job of showing what life was like then when the government went to Philadelphia Jefferson rented a house sight unseen, naturally, which turned out not to be ready for him.
His first months of secretary of state he was sleeping in his living room while they finished the bedroom, and even after that he had to eat at a neighbor's house while they made eating available.
Hard to imagine a Secretary of State living like that now, Brilliantly written biography in a series of biographies by Dumas on Thomas Jefferson, HIGHLY recommend for anyone interested in the political history of our country, I'm on a quest to truly understand the details about how the United States was founded, why, and the personalities of the major players in that task.
Will be posting about each of the biographies in this series, but cannot state emphatically enough how much I enjoy reading these over and over.
Each book sequentially covers a part of Jefferson's robust life, He was, as many know, not just an enormous influence in American history, but a prolific author and highly educated man.
He was also very clinical about his beliefs in life and made no secret of his suspicion of religious ideals.
This would be an incredible summer reading series for someone in high school or college.
Malone has definitely hit his stride in this second volume, Much more readable, organized, and entertaining than the first,
As others have said, Jefferson commits no sin that Malone won't excuse, You wonder if Hamilton is getting as fair a shake as he deserves, and if Jefferson really is as pure of heart as Malone makes him out to be.
Still, who wouldn't want to read about France right before the Revolution through the eyes of Jefferson And it is exciting to watch Hamilton's machinations and see the beginnings of debates that still occupy us.
All of it presented with skill and thoroughness, Well, I didn't exactly finish reading this book, I set it aside to pursue other reading adventures and never got back to it, so I'm pulling it from my currentlyreading list.
understanding the man even more white guyvolThis review applies to the entire series, Jefferson and His Times.
Anyone who wants to understand a fraction of Jefferson, needs to start here, This work is the source that most academicians use, It is thorough and depends upon Jefferson's correspondence, editorials, reports, day books, conversations and memories, What more could you ever need Heavily footnoted, this series puts to shame all other works on this great American.
Some popular authors have written of Jefferson suggesting what he may have thought, or he may have done Brody, anyone Malone is authoritative and needs not speculate.
Read the series and then ask yourself, "Is it more likely than not that Jefferson fathered Sally Hemming's children" I can only conclude that he did not.
I remember when Clinton was president and, when incidents arose which questioned his fidelity, suddenly this old rumor became current.
Someone interviewed the descendants of Hemmings and guess what They all believed they were related to him! Isn't that peculiar NO! What does a reasonable man expect them to say Is it not more impressive to be part of a family that was sired by one of the greatest Americans or his philandering nephew, Peter Carr.
All resurrected in the hope of distracting the American public from a current political scandal, Malone gives a detailed description of Jefferson's activities here as Minister to France and Secretary of State.
The most frustrating part of Malone's Volume II is his inability to give a human portayal of Jefferson.
His dislike of Hamilton is obsessive, even understanding the historiography of Hamilton and Jefferson's feuds as told by historians over the years.
Anything ungodlike that would start to peel back the Trumbullian portrait etched in Jefferson's legacy to show us the human behind the legend, Malone is quick to pass off as a machination of Hamilton's brutish fumblings or he passess off to Madison i.
e. the entire Freneau affair.
This is not for anyone who wants to get to know Jefferson, and if you are looking for an introductory Jefferson biography, I recommend Meacham's sitelink Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power or Joseph Ellis's sitelink American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson.
I am planning on continuing my way through thisvolume set, though after this volume the journey seems much more arduous.
Jeffersons eventful years as United States Minister to France, and as Secretary of State during the first presidential term of George Washington, are well recounted in Dumas Malones Jefferson and the Rights of Man, the second volume of Malones sixvolume biography Jefferson and His Time.
As in the preceding volume, Jefferson the Virginian, Malone provides a sympathetic and wellwritten examination of a crucial period within the life of this important and influential American leader, spanning here the years fromto.
The books title refers to how Jeffersons five years in France, fromto, coincided with the time when the doctrine of les droits de lhomme, the rights of man, was gaining ground in France, in a process that would eventuate in a French Revolution that began just as Jeffersons time in France was ending he left France in October of, five months after the original Bastille Day.
Malonesbook celebrates Jefferson as the perfect and logical champion of universal ideals of human rights,
and does not dwell on Jeffersons inconsistencies in that regard as later historians would do.
Jeffersons time in France was eventful in personal as well as political terms, His wife Martha had died in, and inthe fouryearswidowed Jefferson met one Maria Cosway, the wife of a French painter.
The aristocratic and indulgent atmosphere of the soontobedissolved French court encouraged flirtation, and thus it was that “a generally philosophical gentleman, hungrier for beauty and a woman than he realized, was quite swept off his supposedly wellplanted feet” p.
.
Jeffersons romantic feelings toward Maria Cosway resulted in the writing of “My Head and My Heart,” a Socraticstyle dialogue that must be one of the oddest love letters ever written, and much later inspired theMerchantIvory film Jefferson in Paris, with Nick Nolte as Jefferson and Greta Scacchi as Maria Cosway.
Yet of another crucial character in the reallife drama that inspired the film Sally Hemings, who resided with Jefferson in Paris, and is played in the film by a young Thandie Newton Malone has not a word to say in thepages of Jefferson and the Rights of Man.
It would be left to later historians to make those aspects of the record more complete,
Thomas Jeffersons time in France also saw the completion and publication of the only book he ever published during his lifetime, Notes on the State of Virginia.
Written in part as a riposte to the claims of the French naturalist GeorgeLouis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, that all things coming out of the American landscape were weak and deracinated in comparison with their European counterparts, Notes on the State of Virginia is as paradoxical as its author.
On the one hand, Jefferson writes movingly of how “The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other,” and adds that “Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice can not sleep forever.
” On the other hand, some of Jeffersons words regarding African Americans in Notes on the State of Virginia are so harsh that even the solicitously sympathetic Malone is reduced to a bit of rhetorical scrambling on his subjects behalf: “He was troubled about the black race, which he had seen so close at hand in servitude.
Dubious of the natural equality of endowment of the blacks with their masters, he was keeping his mind open about them” p.
.
Jefferson loved France and admired the French people, but always longed for his home in Virginia in a quote that youre sure to see or hear anytime you get withinmiles of Charlottesville, he wrote from Paris inthat “all my wishes end, where I hope my days will end, at Monticello” p.
. He did get to go home two years later, but his time at Monticello would be short upon his arrival at Norfolk, he learned that “President George Washington had nominated him as secretary of state, the Senate had confirmed him, and he was greeted in Norfolk as a high official of the new government and not merely as a diplomat at home on leave” p.
.
Fans of the hit musical Hamilton! will be glad to hear that Malone gives due emphasis to the conflict that developed between Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson and Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton during George Washingtons first term as president.
Indeed, the importance of the JeffersonHamilton rivalry in Hamilton! speaks to how, as Malone puts it, “these two men have become symbols of a conflict of ideas which runs through the whole of American national history” p.
. Malones sympathies within that conflict of ideas become clear when he writes that “No other American statesman has personified national power and the rule of the favored few so well as Hamilton, and no other has glorified selfgovernment and the freedom of the individual to such a degree as Jefferson” p.
.
Later writers might point out that it was a strong, Hamiltonstyle national government that won the Civil War and destroyed slavery in, and that enforced civil rights for African Americansyears later when Southern state governments were seeking to preserve segregation and might add, while they were at it, that the man whom Malone lionizes as the ultimate champion of “the freedom of the individual” heldindividuals in slavery over the course of his lifetime.
But just as Jefferson and Hamilton, even in the bitterest days of their rivalry, respected each others integrity and abilities, so Malone, while always siding with Jefferson, treats Hamilton with the same scrupulous respect that Jefferson invariably extended toward Hamilton.
Jefferson and the Rights of Man ends in, with Jefferson resigning his secretaryship hoping, no doubt, for a comfortable retirement at Monticello.
We know, as Jefferson could not, that theyears of life left to him would include, among other things, a term as Vice President under John Adams, two terms as President, the purchase from France of the Louisiana Territory, and the founding of the University of Virginia enough material, to put it another way, for Malone to write four more equally massive volumes of Jefferson biography.
The inconsistencies of Jeffersons character notwithstanding, the breadth of Jeffersons achievements continues to impress, Malone writes of these years from Jeffersons life that Jefferson “had kept the faith which he regarded as distinctively American while hoping it would become universal.
He had never ceased to believe that men by right are free in their minds and persons, and that human society should guide its steps by the light of reason” p.
. All those with an interest in Jefferson and his time would do well to take up Jefferson and the Rights of Man.
.