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PARTISAN REVIEW
hailed on the cover of the
Atlantic Monthly
for knocking Jefferson "off his
pedestal" and out of the American canon altogether. Identifying himself
with Edmund Burke, he revived Burke's quarrel with Jefferson over the
French Revolution and added the hyperbolic charge that Jefferson's defense
of it provided "a charter for the most militant segment of the American
militias," who bombed the federal office building in Oklahoma City. None
of this revisionism has anything to do with new documentary discoveries
about Jefferson; it has everything to do with the current climate of opinion,
which mixes a legitimate historical concern about the history of slavery
with a vulgar prosecutorial bent for finding clay feet in public figures.
Henry Adams spoke of needing "a fine pencil," responsive to lights and
shadows, to portray a man whose contradictions make his character so inter–
esting.Joseph]. Ellis's
American Sphinx: the Character <1ThomasJdferson
holds
the promise in its title of taking up Adams's challenge. As historian, Ellis
often does write with more balance than the radical or conservative carica–
turists; but since his book is on character, he must also be a psychologist,
even though a "common sense" one and not a psychoanalytic one, as he tells
us. Yet in effect he is as pejorative and censorious in his view of Jefferson's
personality as bad Freudian biographers are of their subjects..Even when he
seems to come down on Jefferson's side, he does so in a left-handed way.
Under "Jefferson" in his index, the first of only two headings having to
do with his character is "adolescent romanticism of." With conservative bias
Ellis keeps harping on it throughout his book as the key to Jefferson's per–
sonality. Ellis is also reanimating an old quarrel, the political disagreements
between John Adams and Jefferson, and agreeing with the more conservative
Adams that Jefferson's "entire political vision rested on a seductive set of
attractive illusions." To fit this premise Ellis creates an ideologized psychol–
ogy for Jefferson: ''Jefferson was, then, a quintessential Whig, but the Whig
values were so appealing because they blended so nicely with his own quin–
tessentially Jeffersonian character." They blend because the argument is
circular. Ellis finds Jefferson's romantic "cast of mind" in his
A Summary View
<1 the Rights
<1
British America,
in
which he anticipates his indictment agains t
the king in the Declaration of Independence and elaborates the idea of a
Saxon past of pre-Norman England, "which has also become known as the
Whig interpretation of history." This was a widely shared American view,
not peculiar to Jefferson, but Ellis sees it as expressing "the visionary
prospects he already carried around in his mind and heart." How do we
know these "utopian expectations" have "deep roots in his personality"?
Because Ellis says so, asserting that the "sentimental and almost juvenile
character" ofJefferson's illusions was "a central feature of Jefferson's mature
thought and character," their roots lying "buried in the inner folds of
Jefferson's personality, beyond the reach of traditional historical methods and
