Slavery and the Founders: Dilemmas of Jefferson and His Contemporaries

Biographers of Jefferson and historians of the American Revolution have a dilemma, resulting in the inspirational dayglow treatment of their subject. Why should should anyone in pursuit of the facts have a dilemma, the facts speak for themselves? This is an invaluable portrait in greyer hues and contains the delete button data in its two chapters on Jefferson beside a detailed and very interesting history of the slavery debate in the period of the Constitution. Since Jefferson was a man of his time and yet also a man in an extraordinary time almost out of time, the paradox finds what we might expect, a man blocked and buffered in a semi-conscious state of contradiction. Skip Nietzsche, here's the dull reality: in a strange way the realization Jefferson was 'multi-phrenic' rescues Jeckyll here. Yet this makes Jefferson interesting in a different way, in a very useful book (that won't make the bestseller lists). Good piece, fascinating. Ironically rescued Jefferson from my nervous disbelief in many yankee doodle treatments. Makes him fascinating all over again.

Unlike most historians who consider slavery as an unfortunate sidebar to the ideological and political foundations of America, Finkelman boldy places slavery at the center of America's founding. Beginning with the Constitutional Convention of 1787 and continuing through to Jefferson's Declaration of Independence, his views on race and slavery, and his relationship to a woman enslaved to him (Sally Hemings), Finkelman makes a very valid argument that the "traditional" political leadership of the Jeffersonian era was perpetually - not occasionally - in debate about the issue of slavery, with most of those leaders falling on the pro-slavery side of the argument. The real value of the book is Finkelman's two chapters on Jefferson, whose political influence and opinion where nearly as revered by his peers as they are by contemporary early American historians. While noted historians such as Dumas Malone, Joseph Ellis, and Merrill Peterson have stretched the bounds of interpretation of the few seemingly anti-slavery comments Jefferson made or wrote in order to cast him as the unfortunate victim of an institution which he disliked, Finkelman is one of the first to put all of Jefferson's views on slavery and race - the few that seem anti-slavery, the majority that are anti-black, all of which are contradictory - together in one place, IN THEIR PROPER CONTEXT, up for public scrutiny. For anyone wanting an approach to understanding Jefferson's true views on slavery - based on the historical evidence - this is the book to start and, for now, end with. I didn't give it five stars because its focus is kind of narrow, but that could be because Finkelman has done such a great job of narrowing his focus and successfully arguing his understanding of "Race and Liberty in the Age of Jefferson."