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canons of evidence." Jefferson's ideology substitutes for Jefferson's character;
condemning the former, Ellis can demean the latter.
He rejects the circular reasoning of psychoanalytic explanations, which
refer to some childhood experience as explanatory, though it cannot be
retrieved "except by reference to the particular theory posited at the start."
But his own view is circular, finding a key in Jefferson's youthful project for
building Monticello as a reclusive safe haven, which Ellis characterizes as
suggesting "a level of indulged sentimentality that one normally associates
with an adolescent." Ironically, it is the psychoanalyst Erik H. Erikson who
finds Jefferson, whatever trend of nostalgia he may have had, to be a man "of
rare adult stature," while it is the historian who is in the grip of a circular
and reductive explanation ofJefferson's character.
Ellis's only other index heading for Jefferson's character is "conflict
avoidance by." True,Jefferson was notably thin-skinned for a politician, did
not like public speaking, and much preferred writing. At the same time, how–
ever, he plunged over and over again into the most contentious issues of
American politics with definite opinions for which he took responsibility in
trying to implement or revise them in light of the hard realities he encoun–
tered. His major libertarian achievements have to do with his defenses of free
speech and religious freedom, which are based on affirming the important
value of controversy.
Jefferson's rhetoric, Ellis complains, lends itself to "functional promiscu–
ity" so that "where the real Jeffersonian idea ends and the platitudinous cant
begins has become an unanswerable question." But if this "clear voice of
America's revolutionary ideology, its purest conscience, its most brilliant
expositor, its true poet," as the historian Bernard Bailyn has eloquently said,
left a conflicted and confusing legacy, it was not because of the "duplicity
of the pure in heart" or of some "mysterious mechanisms" in his head, as
Ellis believes, but rather because he was also the practical politician, with gifts
for administration, who more than any of his peers confronted the limita–
tions and difficulties of his vision, "the ambiguities of freedom." That is the
truth you cannot learn from the revisionists.
Ellis is a good enough historian to make it clear that Jefferson's cabi–
net was "one of the ablest and most stable" in our history and his first
term as president one of "the most uniformly successful in American pres–
idential history in achieving its stated objectives." Ellis is also fairer than
the other revisionists in acknowledging that Jefferson was a vanguard anti–
slavery reformer until after 1784 and that his prejudicial remarks in
Notes
on Virginia
on the natural inferiority of blacks were "advanced as a suspi–
cion only," though Ellis omi ts letters where Jefferson repudiates them. Like
O'Brien, Ellis makes much of Jefferson's deportation scheme for freed
blacks, but it was also endorsed by Lincoln until 1863, and it was Lincoln
