American Sphinx

American Sphinx by Joseph J. Ellis

Thomas Jefferson's premier scholar of this generation writes this book not to dot i's and cross t's other able biographers have missed but rather to express his own discovered views on the character of the man perhaps most associated today with the founding of our country.

Rebel, statesman, liar, confused, elegant, wise, and mean.  Each of these very disconnected words might have described this tall ruddy Virginian at any moment of his life.

While against slavery in theory he could never find a way to let it go in practice. Sure that young America required a navy to fight the Barbary pirates as soon as they were defeated he mothballed the fleet and left his country wide open when a few years later the British lifted sailors right off our ships at sea.  Always seeking 'less' government like a modern day Tea Party'er going after Obamacare he flaunted the brand new U S Constitution and purchased the Louisiana Territory from napoleon the First for a couple of cents on the acre all on his own presidential say-so.

Thomas Jefferson, remembered as the creator of the Declaration of Independence which, when it was written, was thought to be no more than the period at the end of the Continental Congress's declaration of war with Britain soon learned that if he could defend his authorship well enough he would be called almost the father of his country.. And while author Ellis did not have the facts he would later come to support when he wrote this book, Tom was a master miscegenationist who along with his heirs denied his intimate life with slave Sally Hemmings till the first decade of this century.

A very good read that keeps you moving through the most important character revealing episodes of his life, and doesn't let itself get bogged down in the thousands of Jeffersonian documents that make some other bios of the man overwhelming for all but the most academic.

-Ken