Thomas Jefferson Survives: American Independence in His Time and Ours

“Does Thomas Jefferson still matter?” ask two leading historians on the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.

Thomas Jefferson has been reinvented more than perhaps any American president in history. In the nineteenth century, slavery’s defenders invoked Jefferson’s defense of states’ rights while abolitionists drew on his antislavery writings in support of their cause. After the Civil War, Jefferson’s reputation declined because of his association with secession and disunion, but in the twentieth century, his image soared as he came to embody the democratic values America fought for during World War II.

Unsurprisingly, Jefferson’s legacy has shifted yet again in the twenty-first century, effectively becoming a partisan talisman—jettisoned by the left as a plantation patriarch and repurposed by the right as an avatar of white nationalism. Dissatisfied with these political caricatures and manic swings, leading Jefferson scholars Peter S. Onuf and Francis D. Cogliano instead situate the founding father in his complicated historical context and reveal how his wisdom can be applied today.

In a series of three interrelated essays, the authors paint a nuanced portrait. “Generations” elucidates how Jefferson’s understanding of history shaped his responses to the major problems of his time. “My Country” delves into how he conceived of the American homeland, and “The People” unravels how Jefferson articulated a new national identity in the Declaration of Independence.

Taken together, Thomas Jefferson Survives demonstrates how even amid crisis, Jefferson managed to articulate a capacious and optimistic vision for the future of the American people. As Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Annette Gordon-Reed writes in her foreword, “As much as Jefferson reflected the often-benighted times in which he lived, he rose above them in ways that have a great deal to tell us about the political straits in which we find ourselves.” After all, Jefferson knew better than anyone that 1776 was an important moment, but not the only moment, for Americans to write a better future.