American Sphinx
by Joseph J. Ellis
Summary
American Sphinx is not a full biography of Thomas Jefferson but something more useful, a study of his character, conducted at five revealing moments of the long life, and it earned its title by taking Jefferson's contradictions as the subject rather than an embarrassment. Joseph Ellis visits the young Virginian arriving in Philadelphia in 1775 to draft the language of human equality while owning human beings; the widowed minister in Paris flirting with Maria Cosway and revolution; the party leader building, through others' hands, the first opposition machine while denouncing party itself; the president doubling the country with the Louisiana Purchase under a Constitution he read strictly when it suited him; and the sage of Monticello, dying in debt on a mountaintop built and rebuilt by enslaved labor, still writing the sentences the future would use against him. Ellis's Jefferson is a man of walled compartments, sincere in each and untroubled by the doors between them, allergic to conflict, conducting politics by dinner table and letter, and the book's achievement is to make the elusiveness itself intelligible without excusing what it protected. On Sally Hemings, Ellis judged the evidence inconclusive; the DNA results published in November 1998 changed his mind, as he said publicly, and later printings carry the correction, itself a lesson in how history moves. The book won the 1997 National Book Award for Nonfiction and became the standard one volume path into the Jefferson problem: how the author of the Declaration and the owner of Monticello's slave quarters were one man.
Historical Context & Significance
The book caught the 1990s turn in founders scholarship, after Annette Gordon Reed's case on the Hemings question and before the DNA study of 1998 confirmed it, and Ellis's public revision of his own conclusion became part of the story of how the field corrected itself. The 1997 National Book Award preceded his Pulitzer for Founding Brothers, the book that made him the era's most read historian of the founding. The argument American Sphinx framed, how to hold Jefferson's words and his slaveholding in one mind, has only intensified since, through the Monticello restorations and the monument debates, and the book remains its most readable statement, the volume general readers finish and then argue about, which is what Ellis intended.