Book Review: ‘Thomas Jefferson: A Biography of Flesh and Spirit’ Explores Founders’ Religious Life

Thomas Jefferson: A Biography of Flesh and Spirit, by Thomas S. Kidd (Yale University Press, 320 pp., $30)

Thomas 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.

About the Author

Miles Smith IV

Miles Smith IV is a professor in the history department at Hillsdale College.

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Thomas Jefferson: A Biography of Flesh and Spirit, by Thomas S. Kidd (Yale University Press, 320 pp., $30)

Thomas 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.