The bibliography of Thomas Jefferson refers to published works about Thomas Jefferson, the primary author of the Declaration of Independence and the third president of the United States. Biographical and political accounts for Jefferson now span across three centuries.
Up until 1851, virtually all biographical accounts for Jefferson relied on general and common knowledge gained from official records and public writings and newspapers. Henry S. Randall—the first historian allowed to interview Jefferson's family, giving him access to family letters and records—did biographies of Jefferson take on a more intimate perspective. Randall wrote an 1858 three-volume biography which set the premise for many biographies that followed.[1][2] Before Randall, George Tucker produced his two-volume 1837 account of Jefferson which offered a glint of insight into Jefferson's personal life. Following Jefferson's death he was roundly criticized by the Christian Clergy for his Bible and other writings. Tucker was the first notable historian to explore Jefferson's religious life from a biographical perspective.[3]
Though scrutinized by some historians before, during the 1960s civil rights era, historians, many of them with political and social motivations, began criticizing Jefferson for owning slaves and his racial views.[4] While some of their accounts were unforgiving with their often selective points of view, others have noted that Jefferson, while owning slaves and reluctant to release them into freedom unprepared, was among the first of his time to advance the idea of equality and freedom for the African descendants enslaved in the new world.[5] Many of the older biographical works are now in the public domain and often available online in their entirety in the form of e-books, while later publications whose copyrights are still valid can often be partially viewed on the internet.
Jefferson overview
Thomas Jefferson (April 13, 1743 – July 4, 1826) was an American Founding Father, the principal author of the Declaration of Independence (1776) and the third president of the United States (1801–1809). He served in the Continental Congress, and as a wartime Governor of Virginia (1779–1781). From mid-1784 Jefferson served as a diplomat, stationed in Paris. In May 1785, he became the United States Minister to France.
Jefferson was the first United States Secretary of State (1790–1793) serving under President George Washington. Jefferson and James Madison, organized the Democratic-Republican Party, and subsequently resigned from Washington's cabinet. He was elected Vice President in 1796. He wrote the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions, which attempted to nullify the Alien and Sedition Acts.
As president Jefferson promoted and authorized the Louisiana Purchase from France (1803), and sent the Lewis and Clark Expedition (1804–1806) to explore the new west. His vice president, Aaron Burr, was tried for treason. Hoping to avert war he attempted economic warfare against Britain with his embargo laws. In 1807 he drafted and signed into law a bill banning the importation of slaves into the United States.
Jefferson was a leader in the Enlightenment. He founded the University of Virginia after his presidency. He designed his own large mansion at Monticello and the University of Virginia building. Jefferson was a skilled writer and corresponded with many influential people in America and Europe throughout his adult life. His letters number in the many thousands and are used extensively as references for nearly all works on Jefferson.
Bernard Bailyn on the Jefferson Papers
Historian Bernard Bailyn perused the Jefferson Papers after 1760 and concluded---in "Boyd's Jefferson: Notes for a Sketch" (1960)---that the documents revealed two defining Jeffersonian characteristics. The first was "liberal conventionality," which partly conformed with Carl L. Becker's appraisals of Jeffersonian "liberalism" in The Declaration of Independence: A Study in the History of Political Ideas (1922). Becker's interpretations of Jeffersonian "liberalism" in drafts of The Declaration of Independence (1776) evinced a change from Becker's Progressive Era social liberalism to questioning, particularly after the First Red Scare, the relevance of any natural rights philosophy to early twentieth-century modernities and imperialism, all in the context of fledgling formulations of Jeffersonian democracy. Whether Bailyn anachronistically construed the shift in Becker's interpretations as nascent (more than the dreaded "proto-") Cold War liberalism requires further scholarly inquiry. Bailyn nevertheless added that this Jeffersonian "liberal conventionality" frequently lapsed into the "superficial" and "simple." As an example, Bailyn compared James Madison's contentions in the Virginia Plan and The Federalist Papers to those of Jefferson, who "saw the problem in traditional liberal terms, as [only] a dilemma created by the necessity to increase the powers of the national government and the threat that such powers would constitute to the liberties of the people." Jefferson, in his "liberal conventionality" vis-à-vis the "function of bills of rights," believed that "the real threats to liberty in a republican government come not from the power of the state as such but from 'overbearing majorities.' " Another example was Jefferson's conception of the French Revolution. "It was this liberal conventionality," Bailyn decided, that "engrossed his attention" on French Revolutionary aims to "remodel the institutions of government to conform to enlightenment principles. All else---the latent, irrational elements involved in a social upheaval: the powerful resistance of entrenched privilege, the capricious violence of enflamed mobs, the irresponsibility of demagogues---took him by surprise...Jefferson may have been convinced by his own argument that 'vices in the form of government' lay at the heart of Europe's miseries, but others---more consistent empiricists, more original, dissatisfied, quizzical minds---were not."[6]
A second characteristic spurred a challenge to Carl L. Becker's thesis on an ancillary front. In Bailyn's estimation, Thomas Jefferson proved a "superb 'man of business' " which furthered "plans of his own, plans calculated to advance the cause of America, enlightenment, and liberty." Bailyn subsequently questioned the prevailing "view that Jefferson's 'convictions, his sympathies, his ideas are essentially of the intellect, somehow curiously abstracted from reality'...this conclusion of Becker's appears considerably overdrawn even as it relates to the Declaration; as a general description of Jefferson's personality it is utterly mistaken." Bailyn depicted a deft Jefferson transitioning, time and time again, from fiscal and monetary proposals for "public debt" reduction to those decisions in public commerce and private "finance" that so impressed John Adams. Bailyn also cast Jefferson as an "excellent ambassador" for "American commerce," citing his successful efforts to "re-open the markets for American whale oil" and challenges against the "farmers-general's monopolistic control of French imports of American tobacco." As a result, "Madison, next to whose comments on constitutional principle and theory Jefferson's remarks were rigid and obvious, found his opinion of men and measures penetrating and reliable."[7]
Bailyn's conclusion advanced elements of what became The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution as well as Gordon S. Wood's "Rhetoric and Reality in the American Revolution" (1966). The dual characteristics failed to consistently occupy separate spheres in Thomas Jefferson's writings---often, according to Bailyn, they were a dyadic pair rather than solely correlative. Before Jefferson embarked for Europe in 1784, Bailyn argued, the "means" of the American Revolution had been "necessarily subordinated to the end of survival, and the most effective ideas were the most ideological, the most universally evocative of idealism and self-sacrifice. In this situation of flux the conflict between self-sufficient abstractions and material and social reality was at a minimum." But after 1784, these characteristics increasingly came into conflict as debates over "effective ideas" at their "most ideological" shifted the American Revolution in a different direction(s). Jefferson, for instance, began to study more conceptual underpinnings of the federal Constitution than his initial "dilemma," especially as "he came to grips with the concrete problems, learned more of the political battles that had taken place in the convention, and became caught up, even at such a distance, in the campaign for ratification." Yet, "at other times, as in his involvement in the early stages of the French Revolution, this weak integration of contrasting characteristics led to simultaneous but quite different responses at different levels of activity. At still other times, as in the negotiation of commercial arrangements, it led to an appearance of applying different principles to similar circumstances. It could easily result in apparent inconsistencies which animosity could construe as hypocrisy." These "problems" appeared more manifest after "the conflict between self-sufficient abstractions and material and social reality" was no longer "at a minimum." The "problems" were not only features of an "important biography; they are elements of our national history."[8]
Legend
Sources and publications for Jefferson have emerged for more than 200 years and at this late date there exist many hundreds of them. As such this bibliography, though extensive, is by no means complete at this time. This bibliography also contains books whose titles and subjects are not devoted to Thomas Jefferson per se, but whose content covers the subject of Jefferson well enough for their inclusion in this bibliography.
Format used for listing publications:
Lastname, Firstname; (1900). Title of book in italics, Publisher, Location, 123 pages; ISBN 123-4-5678-9012-3; URL link Book
Note: Some publications make no reference to Location and/or have no ISBN. Unlike bibliographies in subject articles, "Cite book" templates are not used here because too many templates on one page often causes server overload, which often causes load/save problems.
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