American Sphinx

At different times Thomas Jefferson has been claimed by Southern secessionists and Northern abolitionists, New Deal liberals and neo-conservatives. Now the historian Joseph J. Ellis restores our most elusive national icon to human dimensions with insight, sympathy, and superb style. In American Sphinx, he sifts the facts shrewdly from the legends and the rumors, treading a path between vilification and hero worship.

Following his subject from the drafting of the Declaration of Independence to his retirement in Monticello, Ellis unravels the contradictions of the Jeffersonian character. He gives us the slaveholding libertarian; the enemy of government power who exercised it audaciously as president; the visionary who remained curiously blind to the inconsistencies in his nature. From Ellis we learn that Jefferson sang incessantly under his breath and that he delivered only two public speeches in eight years as president, while spending ten hours a day at his writing desk. American Sphinx is a marvel of scholarship, a delight to read, and an essential gloss on the Jeffersonian legacy.

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Title of ebook: American Sphinx
ISBN: 9780375727467
parent-ISBN: 9780679764410
Publisher: Knopf
Published: 09-2000
Released online for download: 09-01-2000
Author of eBook: Ellis, Joseph J.

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American Sphinx

CHAPTER ONE

PROLOGUE Jeffersonian Surge: America, 1992-93

If Jefferson was wrong, America is wrong.
If America is right, Jefferson was right.
--James Parton (1874)

You could reach into your pocket, pull out a nickel and find him gazing into the middle distance--as my liberal friends noted, always looking left. You could go to Charlottesville, Virginia, and see full-length statues of him on the campus he designed, then travel a few miles up his mountaintop and visit his spirit and mansion at Monticello. As of 1993, you could follow the James River down to Williamsburg, a route he took many times as a young man, and see another full-length statue of him on the campus of the College of William and Mary, a recent gift from the college he founded to the college from which he graduated, there looking off to the right--as my conservative friends noted--apparently studying the comings and goings ... read full excerpt from: American Sphinx ebook

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