The Hemingses of Monticello by Annette Gordon-Reed

Johnson faced a nearly impossible task―to succeed America’s greatest chief executive, to bind the nation’s wounds after the Civil War, and to work with a Congress controlled by the so-called Radical Republicans. But just six weeks after becoming Abraham Lincoln’s vice president, the events at Ford’s Theatre thrust him into the nation’s highest office.

Gordon-Reed and Onuf, through a close reading of Jefferson’s own words, reintroduce us all to our most influential founding father: a man more gifted than most, but complicated in just the ways we all are.Īndrew Johnson never expected to be president. Most Blessed of the Patriarchs” fundamentally challenges much of what we’ve come to accept about Jefferson, neither hypocrite nor saint, atheist nor fundamentalist. Challenging the widely prevalent belief that Jefferson remains so opaque as to be unknowable, the authors―through their careful analysis, painstaking research, and vivid prose―create a portrait of Jefferson, as he might have painted himself, one “comprised of equal parts sun and shadow” (Jane Kamensky). Onuf, to present an absorbing and revealing character study that dispels the many clichés that have accrued over the years about our third president. Now, Annette Gordon-Reed teams up with America’s leading Jefferson scholar, Peter S. Lauded as the most articulate voice of American freedom and equality, even as he held people―including his own family―in bondage, Jefferson is variably described as a hypocrite, an atheist, or a simple-minded proponent of limited government who expected all Americans to be farmers forever. Thomas Jefferson is often portrayed as a hopelessly enigmatic figure―a riddle―a man so riven with contradictions that he is almost impossible to know.

The Hemingses of Monticello by Annette Gordon-Reed