His moral and religious life suggests he was not the secularist hero he is sometimes made out to be.
A careful study of the third president's moral and religious life suggests he was not the secularist hero he is sometimes made out to be.
Thomas Jefferson: A Biography of Flesh and Spirit, by Thomas S. Kidd (Yale University Press, 320 pp., $30)
T homas S. Kidd opens his new biography of Thomas Jefferson by relating the mass of inconsistencies in the third president’s life and asking how such a seemingly earnest and even moral man could hold slaves while he spoke of liberty. How could Jefferson engage in a long-standing affair with an enslaved woman who was his dead wife’s half-sister? What makes Kidd’s biography refreshing is that he doesn’t attempt to explain away Jefferson’s contradictions, but he also doesn’t let the 21st-century reader get away with asserting his own moral superiority by labeling Jefferson a hypocrite. Everyone, Kidd notes, is a hypocrite at times. He argues that we should judge historical figures by the standards of their own times. The Jefferson that emerges from the pages of Thomas Jefferson: A Biography of Flesh and Spirit is a brilliant, flawed man.
This work is the first true scholarly biography focused particularly on Jefferson’s relationship with religion. Previous biographies have touched on religion as a tertiary part of Jefferson’s intellectual life, but none have treated it as fully as Professor Kidd has. He brings the 18th century’s religious and social milieu into sharp focus and shows that Jefferson was “hardly a secularist hero,” as he is often made out to be. The moral and social framework of Jefferson’s upbringing and youth was traditionally Christian. His freethinking was not a consequence of his Anglican background; it was a deliberate choice. Jefferson’s tutor, Reverend William Douglas, identified with the Evangelical party in the Church of England and sympathized with figures such as George Whitfield, whose preaching was an important force for cultural unification throughout British North America in the mid 18th century. While Jefferson as an adult rejected the Evangelical Protestant teachings of his tutor, his world and his interactions with that world remained imbued with religion. He saw God and the Devil at work in his romantic relationships, in domestic happenings within his white and enslaved families, and in politics. He read sermons throughout his life and famously created his own edition of the Bible. Despite his interest in religion, however, religiosity eluded him. Kidd’s Jefferson never seems attracted to institutional religious practice. His relationship with the Church of England was antagonistic, and his most visible religious support politically came from dissenters — Baptists and Presbyterians — who saw him as a champion of religious liberty.
His commitment to religious liberty is an underlying theme throughout the book. Kidd pays particular attention to Jefferson’s relationship with dissenters, the tradition from which Evangelical religiosity in the United States sprang. Strangely, this relationship has often been overlooked by historians interested in Jefferson’s commitment to religious liberty. During the 1980s and 1990s, a number of Jefferson biographies were published by historians riding the wave of resurgent interest in him. They did not ignore religious aspects of Jefferson’s intellectual life altogether, but most sidelined his interactions with Christianity and focused on his relationship with Enlightenment ideals or natural philosophy. Noble Cunningham saw Jefferson as an imperfect but sincere devotee of reason and rationality. This Jefferson wanted to throw off antiquated obstacles to human liberty and was a classical liberal devoted to the precepts of the French Enlightenment. Joseph Ellis’s Jefferson was also an icon of the Enlightenment who saw man’s best hope for escaping the imperfections of human history and society in a return to nature. For Ellis, Jefferson was an idealist always looking for a pristine existence unmarred by human disregard for nature, an ideal which he found in some measure in trying to create his agrarian model at Monticello.
Kidd’s Jefferson is more complex, more conflicted, and ultimately more human than Ellis’s or Cunningham’s. Kidd notes that Jefferson disliked getting lectured about religion but was more than happy to write friends and constituents about his own beliefs regarding spiritual matters. This helps explains why Jefferson, who was regularly accused of atheism and infidelity throughout his political career, managed to keep the allegiance of some of the most religious Americans of his era. Like the dissenters whose hopes he championed with his Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom and his subsequent efforts to disestablish the state church, Jefferson wanted the coercive elements of religion removed from society altogether. Anything that compelled consciences had no place in a republic, he believed.
The great mystery of Jefferson’s life is that for all his rhetorical and political work in the cause of human liberty, he never saw fit to free his own slaves. His relationship with human bondage was far from passing. He owned over 200 slaves and ran a plantation. He had distasteful and mistaken beliefs about race. Kidd admits that the third president was a deeply flawed, inconsistent, and even strange human being.
Kidd’s commitment to careful examination of the historical record pays off in particular regarding the most controversial and salacious aspect of Jefferson’s life — his relationship with Sally Hemings — and the reader is offered the best treatment of the subject available in print. Kidd states that the evidence is clear that Jefferson fathered Sally’s children but asks his reader not to speculate too deeply on the exact nature of their relationship. He does not shy away from addressing the inevitable reality of the power imbalance that existed between masters and bound humans, but he does not use this as a license to conjecture.
Kidd’s biography may well be the best treatment of Jefferson’s religious and moral life available, and certainly it is among the few to take those two subjects seriously while carefully avoiding hagiography or anachronism. It deserves a wide readership.