Gordon Wood is one of America’s premier historians and a national treasure. Winner of the Pulitzer as well as the Bancroft Prize, he is a rare scholar who writes with a combination of insight, academic depth, and accessible prose. In his latest book, penned at the summit of his career, Wood now sets his sights on the relationship of two of America’s most remarkable and fascinating statesmen, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams.
The story is enthralling. These two men of the Revolution couldn’t have been more different. Few, even among the Founders, brought such a unique blend of prodigious vitality and formidable intellect to American life as did Jefferson. He lived on a little mountain high atop an inhospitable wilderness rise; it was his “hermitage” or retreat — he called it Monticello. His dinner parties reverberated like Greek colloquia, and inside his walls percolated the ideas that helped forge a country and change the world. He was an aristocrat by birth, yet by temperament he was a populist. Where other Founders were skeptical of their fellow man, Jefferson, as Wood shows us, would one day become — despite being a lifelong slaveholder — democracy’s champion.
Comments