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M. Andrew Holowchak

M. Andrew Holowchak, Ph.D., is a professor of philosophy and history, who taught at institutions such as University of Pittsburgh, University of Michigan, and Rutgers University, Camden. He is author/editor of over 70 books and over 325 published essays on topics such as ethics, ancient philosophy, science, psychoanalysis, and critical thinking. His current research is on Thomas Jefferson—he is acknowledged by many scholars to be the world’s foremost authority—and has published over 230 essays and 28 books on Jefferson. He also has numerous videos and two biweekly series with Donna Vitak, titled “One Work, Five Questions” and "The Real Thomas Jefferson," on Jefferson on YouTube. He can be reached at mholowchak@hotmail.com

Texas’ Declaration of Independence Blog

Texas’ Declaration of Independence

On March 2, 1836, Texas formally proclaimed its independence from Mexico with a declaration of independence at a convention at Washington-on-the Brazos. The event leading to that declaration was a revolution of Mexicans against the increasingly tyrannical governing of Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna. In 1824, Santa Anna dissolved the Mexican constitution with publication of his Seven Laws, which in…
M. Andrew Holowchak
November 2, 2026
Jefferson and the Barbary Wars Blog

Jefferson and the Barbary Wars

Thomas Jefferson today is often castigated by “manly” scholars for not being more like George Washington or his aide-de-camp Alexander Hamilton. Though an excellent horseman, those skills were never on display during the American Revolution—especially during the British assault on Virginia during Jefferson’s tenure as governor (1779–1781). Yet that is like criticizing a puffin for being a puffin. Jefferson was…
M. Andrew Holowchak
October 15, 2026
The Monroe Doctrine Blog

The Monroe Doctrine

In his lengthy Seventh Annual Address to the US Congress—6354 words—President James Monroe offers an assessment of the state of the United States during the latter stages of his second term in office. The address—written by John Quincy Adams who often shows that he has his father’s DNA by wordiness, infelicity of grammar, and lack of clarity of expression in…
M. Andrew Holowchak
October 6, 2026
History by Hair? Blog

History by Hair?

Finally, it is out! The much-ballyhooed book History by a Hair! The book is motivated by a 15-year DNA study by Richard Green, Samuel Vohr, and 12 others, including the Smithsonian’s own Richard Kurin, who prompted the study and wrote the book. The book, published by Crown, has the following write-up: The definitive account of how a discarded strand of…
M. Andrew Holowchak
September 29, 2026
Being Andrew Burstein Blog

Being Andrew Burstein

A review of Being Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2026) by Andrew Burstein “It is a truism that every attempt at history writing and biography is an improvisation, including this one.” ~Andrew Burstein “Improvising” is equivalent to “winging it.” I cannot agree that all history is improvisation. I cannot even concede that improvisation ought to be acceptable in any part…
M. Andrew Holowchak
September 16, 2026
If Jefferson’s Paternity of Sally’s Kids Is So Very Well Supported by Evidence, Why Won’t the Pro-Paternity People Debate the Issue? Blog

If Jefferson’s Paternity of Sally’s Kids Is So Very Well Supported by Evidence, Why Won’t the Pro-Paternity People Debate the Issue?

Some two months ago, I asked historian Courtney Crowley, who has become a member of our team at “Thomas Jefferson Lives” (aka, The Real Thomas Jefferson), if she could email four persons in the “Onufian Family”—Annette Gordon-Reed, Andrew Burstein, Kevin Gutzman, and of course “dude” himself, Peter Onuf—and ask whether any would participate in a debate on Jefferson’s avowed paternity.…
M. Andrew Holowchak
August 13, 2026
Can We Trust Madison Hemings’ Testimony in the Putative Jefferson-Hemings Affair? Blog

Can We Trust Madison Hemings’ Testimony in the Putative Jefferson-Hemings Affair?

Harvard professor Annette Gordon-Reed—who has won numerous awards, including a Pulitzer Prize, for her book The Hemingses of Monticello (2009)—is widely acknowledged to be the world’s foremost authority on the nature of the relationship between Thomas Jefferson and his toothsome slave, Sally Hemings. In chapters 13 through 16 of that book and in several subsequent interviews and talks, she goes…
M. Andrew Holowchak
August 3, 2026
Franklin and Jefferson Blog

Franklin and Jefferson

When Thomas Jefferson submitted his fair copy of the Declaration of Independence to the Second Continental Congress, he was unnerved at the prospect of members of the Congress, scrutinizing his document and suggesting changes. While the Congress was mulling over Jefferson’s Fair Copy of the Declaration of Independence, Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790)—who himself was part of the Congress-appointed, five-member committee to…
M. Andrew Holowchak
July 22, 2026
Is Jefferson “The Most Overrated Person in American History”? Blog

Is Jefferson “The Most Overrated Person in American History”?

In American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence (1997), Pauline Maier takes herself to advance the points that Karl Becker wanted to advance in his book on the Declaration, some 70 years earlier, but was prohibited from advancing, because of the conservative time in which he lived. She begins with astonishment that the Declaration of Independence is today treated as…
M. Andrew Holowchak
July 1, 2026
Fabricating “History” Blog

Fabricating “History”

Joe Ellis, of Mount Holyoke College, has made a career of being controversial. At one point, his tenureship was in jeopardy, as he claimed falsely to his students at Mt. Holyoke College to have fought in the Vietnam War. He did not. Ellis has also been unfriendly to Thomas Jefferson. Yet that, Jefferson-unfriendliness, has been happening at least since the…
M. Andrew Holowchak
June 22, 2026
Was Jefferson Wrong? TEXIT Argues No Blog

Was Jefferson Wrong? TEXIT Argues No

The republicanism that Thomas Jefferson envisaged has never enrooted in America. Over its many decades, it has moved increasingly away from a model of thin, decentralized government, where the states are sovereign—a model at least that Jefferson hoped would slowly emerge, beginning with his two terms as president—to thick, centralized government where the federal government is sovereign and economic measures…
M. Andrew Holowchak
June 8, 2026
What Did Jefferson Mean by “Empire of Liberty”? Blog

What Did Jefferson Mean by “Empire of Liberty”?

The American Revolution, those who were the major movers in it recognized, was an event singular in the history of the world. That the colonies could have both come together in unanimity to uprise against England and win its independence from their mother country through a sanguinary war were sufficiently singular happenings. After winning the war, the problem the Colonists…
M. Andrew Holowchak
May 26, 2026
A Model of Government Stewardship Blog

A Model of Government Stewardship

Thomas Jefferson had, in his first term as US president, one of the most successful presidencies in US history. Knowing the pricelessness of books, he sanctioned the Library of Congress and helped to build it. He purchased the Louisiana territories for 10 million dollars—a pittance—and doubled the size of the country. He began a course to reduce the US debt, and despite purchasing the Louisiana lands, the…
M. Andrew Holowchak
May 11, 2026
Reluctant Secessionist Blog

Reluctant Secessionist

Secession, grasped in its political sense, is typically defined as a formal withdrawal of one body, qua political state or qua a nascent political state, from another political state of which it is a member. The reason for withdrawal is customarily that what bound the lesser body to the larger political state is no longer binding or that the relationship has become parasitic or toxic. The paradigmatic illustration is the secession of 11…
M. Andrew Holowchak
April 28, 2026
Jefferson’s True Love Blog

Jefferson’s True Love

On January 1, 1772, Jefferson took as his wife the widow of Bathurst Skelton, Martha Wayles Skelton, at The Forest—the residence of John Wayles, father of Jefferson’s wife. Once married, the two set out for the long ride to Monticello. They drove their carriage in a light snow which became denser as they entered the Virginian countryside of Albemarle County.…
M. Andrew Holowchak
February 15, 2026
The Mystery of the Beale Treasure Blog

The Mystery of the Beale Treasure

In 1885, there was published in Lynchburg by James B. Ward a small manuscript, titled The Beale Papers, Containing Authentic Statements Regarding the Treasure Buried in 1819 and 1821 near Bufords, in Bedford County, Virginia, and Which Has Never Been Recovered. The pamphlet, which sold for 50 cents, contained three ciphertexts. A ciphertext is a matter of encrypting or encoding…
M. Andrew Holowchak
January 30, 2026
The Mysterious Relationship Between Thomas Jefferson and Black Mathematician Benjamin Banneker Blog

The Mysterious Relationship Between Thomas Jefferson and Black Mathematician Benjamin Banneker

Benjamin Banneker (1731–1806), the son of freed slaves, was a natural scientist and mathematician. Born in Baltimore County, Maryland, little is known of the exact course of his life. He appears to have been mostly self-educated. His early years of manhood were spent mostly on his 100-acre tobacco farm, owned by his parents, freed slaves. He was, however, a tinkerer…
M. Andrew Holowchak
January 7, 2026
Jefferson and the Indians Blog

Jefferson and the Indians

Jefferson’s views on Indians were characterized by ambivalence. Jefferson both loved and hated Native Americans at times because he de profundis animi (from the depths of his soul) loved Native Americans. That is not posited as a thesis, for it should be obvious to anyone who examines Jefferson’s presidential writings on Native Americans, but as an observation. Jefferson was, through…
M. Andrew Holowchak
December 5, 2025
Framing a Legend Blog

Framing a Legend

“Truth will do well enough if left to shift for herself. She seldom has received much aid from the power of great men to whom she is rarely known and seldom welcome. She has no need of force to procure entrance into the minds of men. ~Thomas Jefferson, “Notes on Religion,” 1776 INTRODUCTION TO CHAPTER 5 OF FRAMING A LEGEND:…
M. Andrew Holowchak
November 24, 2025
Thomas and Randolph Blog

Thomas and Randolph

Unsurprising it would be to find that many persons, decently familiar with Thomas Jefferson (and that includes Early American historians), were unaware that he had a brother. Biographers sometimes passingly mention Randolph early in a Jeffersonian biography inasmuch as Thomas, as the older brother, was saddled with the task of choosing between a tract of land on the Rivanna River…
M. Andrew Holowchak
October 10, 2025
“A ferocious hate of the Southern white man” Blog

“A ferocious hate of the Southern white man”

Is Israel Jefferson’s 1873 Account of Jefferson’s Paternity of Sally Hemings’ Children Worthful or Worthless? It is commonplace for many Jeffersonian scholars, uncritically accepting Jefferson’s paternity of all of Sally Hemings’ children, to speak of slave Israel Gillette’s 1873 comments on Jefferson’s paternity as being corroborative or confirmatory evidence for that paternity—e.g., the Thomas Jefferson Foundation’s account of Gillette’s published…
M. Andrew Holowchak
September 29, 2025
Why Did Jefferson Write the Notes on the State of Virginia? Blog

Why Did Jefferson Write the Notes on the State of Virginia?

Thomas Jefferson in his 1821 never-finished autobiography, writes of the motivation for and the history behind his only book Notes on Virginia: Before I had left America, that is to say in the year 1781. I had received a letter from M. de Marbois, of the French legation in Philadelphia, informing me he had been instructed by his government to…
M. Andrew Holowchak
September 16, 2025
Lafayette at Monticello Blog

Lafayette at Monticello

President James Monroe in 1824 invited the Marquis de Lafayette, an enormous French figure in the American and French Revolutions, to visit the United States after decades abroad in France. Lafayette agreed to visit and the visit would last over a year, from August 15, 1824, to September 3, 1825. Jefferson invited the great Frenchman to pay him a visit.…
M. Andrew Holowchak
August 28, 2025
The Genius of Thomas Jefferson Blog

The Genius of Thomas Jefferson

The question “Was Thomas Jefferson a genius?” might seem awkward to anyone who has spent any time studying Jefferson, for it admits an obvious answer: He was. I have consistently maintained that he was one of the most gifted thinkers of his day—“gifted” because of his Edison-like penchant for and persistency at hard study and hard work. He had an…
M. Andrew Holowchak
August 15, 2025
Jefferson on Constitutions Blog

Jefferson on Constitutions

Political institutions not exact systems as are geometrical “systems” such as Euclidean geometry and its alternatives, Lobachevskian (hyperbolic) and Riemannian (elliptical) geometries. Hence, the principles of any constitution cannot be taken, as they often are, as axiomata as they are in geometries. They are, however, philosophically based: both on the nature of humans and the best life for humans, given…
M. Andrew Holowchak
July 28, 2025
Jefferson’s Declaration Blog

Jefferson’s Declaration

On June 9, 1776, the Continental Congress appointed a committee of five men—Virginian Thomas Jefferson, New Englander John Adams, Pennsylvanian Benjamin Franklin, New Yorker Robert Livingston, and New Englander Roger Sherman—to draft a declaration of American independence. The motivation for the document—the one given to the committee by the Congress—is certainly conveyed in the opening salvo of Jefferson’s draft: to…
M. Andrew Holowchak
July 7, 2025
Institutionalized Wokism as the Norm in Jeffersonian Scholarship Blog

Institutionalized Wokism as the Norm in Jeffersonian Scholarship

Abbeville Institute Press recently (2025) published my book--Sally Hemings, Race, and Song-and-Dance Historiography: The Corruption of Jefferson Scholarship by Institutional Wokeism. The book has 24 short, easily digestible essays—inasmuch as my writings can be construed as easily digestible!—in  three sections. I proffer some comments on why I wrote the book. In the introduction I define “wokeism” roughly as “being awake…
M. Andrew Holowchak
June 25, 2025
“I Cannot Live Without Books” Blog

“I Cannot Live Without Books”

“I cannot live without books,” Jefferson confides in a letter to John Adams (10 June 1815). The statement today is well-known and readily available on coffee mugs, book bags, and tee-shirts, for anyone willing to pay an inflated price. What is seldom recognized is that the statement is part of a larger sentence, which continues concessively, “but fewer will suffice…
M. Andrew Holowchak
June 20, 2025
A Stately Symposium Blog

A Stately Symposium

Thomas Jefferson received a singular letter, he wrote in his Autobiography, on July 20, 1789. The writer, Champion de Cicé, the Archbishop of Bordeaux, was the chairman of a committee for the construction of a constitution for a new French government and he asked Jefferson to be present concerning their deliberations on a constitution. Jefferson excused himself. His role, he…
M. Andrew Holowchak
June 12, 2025
A Slimy Turn of Events at Monticello Blog

A Slimy Turn of Events at Monticello

When Dan Jordan left the presidency of Monticello in 2008, the job was gifted to Leslie Greene Bowman (MA, history, University of Delaware). Prior to Monticello, Bowman oversaw Winterthur, a historic house in northern Delaware. During her tenure at Monticello, Bowman created a new visitor center, opened the upstairs of Monticello which was long closed to visitors due to its…
M. Andrew Holowchak
June 5, 2025
The Destruction of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation Blog

The Destruction of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation

In 1985, Daniel Jordan—a Ph.D. in history from University of Virginia—became president of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, which owns and runs Monticello. He would preside over Monticello for the next 24 years, during which time Thomas Jefferson’s life and legacy would be radically transformed through information made readily available by the Thomas Jefferson Foundation. Under his guidance, TJF created a…
M. Andrew Holowchak
May 27, 2025
To Free or Not to Free Blog

To Free or Not to Free

It is often acknowledged that Jefferson did much in his years prior to his retirement from political activity to try to eradicate the institution of slavery. Writes Gilbert Chinard in Thomas Jefferson: The Apostle of Americanism: “No New Englander had done more to promote the cause of abolition than Jefferson; on two occasions he had proposed legislative measures to put…
M. Andrew Holowchak
May 14, 2025
How Does Trump Measure up to Jefferson’s Essential Principles of Republicanism Blog

How Does Trump Measure up to Jefferson’s Essential Principles of Republicanism

In a prior essay, I covered a comparison of Thomas Jefferson and Donald Trump on presidential power. The discussion was more theoretical, than practical. In this essay, I compare the two US presidents from the perspective not of how each thought about presidential power, but of how each exercised that power. His First Inaugural Address (1801) is without question one…
M. Andrew Holowchak
May 2, 2025
Jefferson on the Possibility of White Slaves and Black Masters Blog

Jefferson on the Possibility of White Slaves and Black Masters

Sholars today typically refer to Query XIV of his Notes on the State of Virginia as evidence of Jefferson’s racism. Jefferson states that Blacks were likely inferior in imagination, beauty, and intelligence, and more bestial and hasty in romance, but added that such sentiments must be taken cum grano salis—at least, until such time as they can be made objects…
M. Andrew Holowchak
April 10, 2025
Thomas Jefferson, Black Women, and Male Orangutans Blog

Thomas Jefferson, Black Women, and Male Orangutans

Jefferson’s reference in Query XIV of Notes on the State of Virginia to male orangutans’ preference for black women is often cited as evidence of his unabashed racism and Jefferson’s sheer lack of criticality and his credulity. Jefferson writes: Flowing hair, a more elegant symmetry of form, their own judgment in favour of the whites, declared by their preference of…
M. Andrew Holowchak
March 31, 2025
Fibbing Finkleman on Thomas Jefferson Blog

Fibbing Finkleman on Thomas Jefferson

In 1994, The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography published Paul Finkelman’s “Thomas Jefferson and Slavery: The Myth Goes On.” It is an essay, cleverly crafted, which deserves critical examination, because, cleverly crafted, it overwhelmingly misleads. Finkelman begins: Thomas Jefferson is certainly the most popular saint of American civil religion. His closest rival is Abraham Lincoln. But Lincoln was merely…
M. Andrew Holowchak
March 21, 2025
How Did Jefferson Define “Democracy”? Blog

How Did Jefferson Define “Democracy”?

Confidence in the people, writes C.E. Merriam, Jr., in a 1902 paper on Jefferson’s political thinking, was the “distinguishing characteristic in the theory of Jeffersonian democracy.” What Jefferson wrote on republican governing “was notable … because of its rhetoric than because of its scientific depth or clearness.” Jefferson offered nothing new, did not penetrate deeply into political theory, and was…
M. Andrew Holowchak
March 11, 2025
Jefferson on Executive Action Blog

Jefferson on Executive Action

Jefferson was ever committed to tripartite governmental powers, comprising an executive, the legislature, and the judiciary. Each branch, he asserts to George Wythe (July 1776), should be independent of the others to offer itself as a check on the others. The independence of the executive from the legislative is of utmost importance, for otherwise the executive might have undue influence…
M. Andrew Holowchak
February 21, 2025
Did Jefferson Really Hate Washington? Blog

Did Jefferson Really Hate Washington?

Editor's Note: Professor Holowchak has published a SIGNED leather bound edition of his book, Framing a Legend: Exposing the Distorted History of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings. You can take 10% the retail price at checkout by using the code JEFFERSON. Scholars commonly talk of the enmity between George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, as they commonly do of the enmity…
M. Andrew Holowchak
February 5, 2025
Jefferson’s “Religion” Blog

Jefferson’s “Religion”

In one of my recent videos, a viewer from Abbeville asked whether Thomas Jefferson was a deist or a theist. This essay answers that question. There has been and continues to be overwhelming confusion apropos of Jefferson’s religiosity. That is, in large part, due to Jefferson, whose behavior invites contradictory assessments of it. He attended worship and participated in prayers…
M. Andrew Holowchak
January 24, 2025
Thomas Jefferson’s Christmas Eve Wish Blog

Thomas Jefferson’s Christmas Eve Wish

On Christmas Eve 1786, a mawkish Thomas Jefferson pens a letter (below, in toto) to Maria Cosway, a lovely Italian painter and musician, married by convenience to the eccentric and monkeylike Richard Cosway—a foppish macaroni. Jefferson met the Cosways on August 6, 1786, when he and American artist John Trumbull met them by accident while Jefferson and Trumbull were admiring…
M. Andrew Holowchak
December 26, 2024
Jefferson on Secession: Pro and Con Blog

Jefferson on Secession: Pro and Con

Jefferson was always committed to the rights to revolt and to secede. They are of the gist of his Declaration of Independence and his sanction of bottom-up government. Republican government, he often says—especially in three singular letters in 1816—is government by the vox populi (lit., voice of the people). He writes to Samuel Kercheval (12 July 1816): Governments are republican…
M. Andrew Holowchak
December 19, 2024
Fear and Propaganda: The Jefferson-Hemings Myth Blog

Fear and Propaganda: The Jefferson-Hemings Myth

For 25 years, The Thomas Jefferson (Memorial) Foundation has been pushing the story of Jefferson’s involvement of Sally Hemings. In 2000, after conclusion of their analysis of the 1998 DNA study concerning Jefferson’s avowed paternity of Hemings’ children, their story was that it was very likely that Jefferson fathered all of Hemings’ children, but in 2018, the qualifiers were removed:…
M. Andrew Holowchak
December 12, 2024
Getting to Know Thomas Jefferson Blog

Getting to Know Thomas Jefferson

As editor-in-Chief of the inaugural issue of the now-defunct theme-based journal, The Journal of Thomas Jefferson’s Life and Times, I was asked to write the feature, introductory essay, which I titled “‘A silent execution of duty’: The Republican Pen of Thomas Jefferson.” It was a daunting task, as I aimed to introduce the journal by constructing an essay that would…
M. Andrew Holowchak
December 5, 2024
While Hegel Smiles in His Grave: A Colorful Explanation of Jefferson’s Racism Blog

While Hegel Smiles in His Grave: A Colorful Explanation of Jefferson’s Racism

A review of Black Reason, White Feeling: The Jeffersonian Enlightenment in the African American Tradition (University of Virginia Press, 2024) by Hannah Spahn Following philosopher Immanuel Kant, the Enlightenment, says Hannah Spahn, can be summed by the formula sapere aude (“dare to know”), Spahn focuses on two figures she takes to be representative of that climate: black “poet” Phillis Wheatley…
M. Andrew Holowchak
November 19, 2024
A Knotty Nodus Blog

A Knotty Nodus

I have ever championed the view that the hallmark of good history or philosophy, especially for young scholars, is for a scholar to take what might be considered as a small problem or topic, perhaps one typically overpassed by others (e.g., Jefferson and guns), and do a thorough job of it. In that way, whoever wishes to write on that…
M. Andrew Holowchak
November 8, 2024
Thomas Jefferson’s Ambivalence Concerning the Physic of His Day Blog

Thomas Jefferson’s Ambivalence Concerning the Physic of His Day

This essay is dedicated to Dr. White McKenzie “Ken” Wallenborn, a cherished friend, dedicated unflinchingly to honesty concerning the life and legacy of Thomas Jefferson. “Dr. Ken” passed on October 1, 2024. He was 95 years of age. Upon graduation from UVA’s medical school in 1955, Dr. Ken was called to active duty in the Air Force and he served…
M. Andrew Holowchak
October 23, 2024
Jefferson on Liberty and Truth Blog

Jefferson on Liberty and Truth

The Enlightenment was an epoch of unbridled optimism—a break from centuries of often blind reliancy on authority, and the sources of authority were generally the Bible and the works of Aristotle. With the shift to understanding the universe through empirical investigation of it (Gr., empeiria = experience), reliancy on authority weakened. Science—in the sense of strict observation of the world,…
M. Andrew Holowchak
October 15, 2024
Jefferson’s Political Philosophy Critiqued Blog

Jefferson’s Political Philosophy Critiqued

A Review of Garrett Ward Sheldon’s The Political Philosophy of Thomas Jefferson (Johns Hopkins, 1993) by Garret Ward Sheldon In his preface to The Political Philosophy of Thomas Jefferson, political theorist Garrett Ward Sheldon articulates a modest, but significant aim for beginning his book, and he does so economically: in one paragraph. Sheldon takes seriously the notion of Jefferson as…
M. Andrew Holowchak
October 10, 2024
George III and the Revolution Blog

George III and the Revolution

In Summary View of the Rights of British America (1774), Jefferson writes of King George III’s unwillingness to use his “negative” to abort unjust proposals. Jefferson again writes similarly is in his first draft of Declaration of Independence, two years later. Jefferson here lists a “long train of abuses & usurpations,” at the hand of King George III. Those, he…
M. Andrew Holowchak
October 1, 2024
Jefferson’s Greatest Legacy Blog

Jefferson’s Greatest Legacy

It is well-known today that Thomas Jefferson considered his Declaration of Independence, his Bill for Religious Freedom, and his University of Virginia to be his greatest contributions to humanity. That is why he had those deeds inscribed proudly on his tombstone. Yet perhaps his greatest legacy, mostly flouted today because of scholarly indifference to the large moral dimension of his…
M. Andrew Holowchak
September 23, 2024
“The Whole Affair Has Been Conducted by Amateurs” Blog

“The Whole Affair Has Been Conducted by Amateurs”

In the November 5, 1998, piece for Nature, a group of scientists, led by pathologist Dr. Eugene Foster, had published a piece titled “Jefferson Fathered Slave’s Last Child.” Utilizing what was at the time state-of-the-art Y-chromosome DNA analysis—the Y-chromosome is identical in a particular line of males (e.g., Jefferson’s Y-chromosome is the same as this father’s, his grandfather’s, his brother’s,…
M. Andrew Holowchak
September 10, 2024
Jefferson v. Adams on “The Natural Aristocracy” Blog

Jefferson v. Adams on “The Natural Aristocracy”

After a lengthy respite due to tensions between the two that began during Adams’ presidency, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, with the intervention of Benjamin Rush, resumed their correspondence with a brief letter from Adams to Jefferson on January 1, 1812. On June 15, 1813, Jefferson aims to clear the air, as it were. He brings up partisan differences concerning…
M. Andrew Holowchak
September 5, 2024
The Honest Zealot Versus the Troublesome Ideologue Blog

The Honest Zealot Versus the Troublesome Ideologue

A Critique of Thomas Fleming’s The Great Divide: The Conflict between Washington and Jefferson that Defined a Nation A book about the conflict between George Washington and Thomas Jefferson is overdue, says Thomas Fleming. “Numerous historians have explored Jefferson’s clash with Alexander Hamilton. But little has been written about the differences that developed between the two most famous founding fathers”…
M. Andrew Holowchak
August 27, 2024
Thomas Jefferson on Educating Republican Citizens Blog

Thomas Jefferson on Educating Republican Citizens

After publishing my book, Thomas Jefferson: Uncovering His Unique Philosophy and Vision (2014)—which had three chapters each on Jefferson’s political philosophy, his moral thinking, and his philosophy of education—I realized that I had far from exhausted what could be said on each of the subjects. Thus, I began the first of a trilogy of books on the philosophy of Thomas…
M. Andrew Holowchak
August 20, 2024
Jefferson’s Summary View as a Political Document with a Strong Southern Flair Blog

Jefferson’s Summary View as a Political Document with a Strong Southern Flair

In a 2022 essay for Abbeville, “Jefferson’s Textured Republicanism,” I examine letters by Jefferson on the differences between Federalists and Republicans. Jefferson argues that there is a constitutional (physical) difference between Federalists (Tories) and Republicans (Whigs), which manifests itself in polar political sentiments. Republicans and Whigs are Saxon-sympathizers; Federalists and Tories, Norman-sympathizers. In a letter from Jefferson to Marquis de…
M. Andrew Holowchak
August 13, 2024
The Unimpeachable Authority of Annette Gordon-Reed on Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings Blog

The Unimpeachable Authority of Annette Gordon-Reed on Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings

“Travelling through a desert, a man saw a woman, standing alone and with her eyes fixed to the ground. “‘Who are you,’ asked he. “‘I am Truth,’ she replied. “‘Why have you left the city and retreated to the desert?’ “‘Times have changed. In days bygone, few people lied. Yet now, all people lie.’ “Human life is a vile and…
M. Andrew Holowchak
July 31, 2024
How Liberal was Thomas Jefferson’s Liberalism? Blog

How Liberal was Thomas Jefferson’s Liberalism?

Government, Thomas Jefferson all too frequently notes, is for the sake of the wellbeing of all citizens, each considered the political equal of all others and, in consequence, deserving of the same rights. Government, thus, exists for the sake of the wellbeing of all citizens, considered as individuals. Government, he often says, is of and for the people. That noted,…
M. Andrew Holowchak
July 24, 2024
A Northerner by Birth, A Southerner by Choice Blog

A Northerner by Birth, A Southerner by Choice

When speaking at Abbeville’s “The 1607 Project,” someone from the audience came to me, after my talk—and the Abbeville audience was electric!—and said, “You really mean what you say.” It was a curious sentiment, for by implication, I could conclude that many speakers at that or other conferences merely go about the business of public speaking without investing personally in…
M. Andrew Holowchak
July 18, 2024
A Book on Jefferson’s Declaration That is About Everything but the Declaration Blog

A Book on Jefferson’s Declaration That is About Everything but the Declaration

A review of Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality (Liveright, 2015) by Danielle Allen “The Declaration of Independence matters because it helps us see that we cannot have freedom without equality,” writes Danielle Allen in the first sentence of her prologue. Its claim to freedom, in fact, rests on “it so clear-eyed about…
M. Andrew Holowchak
July 12, 2024
The GOAT of Political Documents Blog

The GOAT of Political Documents

“When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth the separate & equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that…
M. Andrew Holowchak
July 2, 2024
Jefferson and the Four Faces of Liberty Blog

Jefferson and the Four Faces of Liberty

Precisely what Jefferson means by “liberty” is a matter of considerable debate among scholars. Merrill Peterson in “Thomas Jefferson and the National Purpose” says that liberty for Jefferson was a code of restraint on sovereignty, exercised by a few or many. Thus, liberty involved minifying and decentralizing government. “He was the first to see that strength, the progress, even the…
M. Andrew Holowchak
June 27, 2024
Another Book about White Privilege at a Southern Plantation Blog

Another Book about White Privilege at a Southern Plantation

A review of The Jeffersons at Shadwell (Yale University Press, 2010) by Susan Kern The first question that demands an answer in reviewing a book is this: Why is this book needed? Without straightforwardly answering that question, Susan Kern in The Jeffersons at Shadwell at least implicitly answers that question by allowing discerning readers to craft, through reading her book,…
M. Andrew Holowchak
June 17, 2024
Thomas Jefferson and the Other (Black) Patrick Henry Blog

Thomas Jefferson and the Other (Black) Patrick Henry

Thomas Jefferson bought the 57-acre tract of land including the Natural Bridge of Virginia in 1774—the year he produced his vitriolic Summary View of the Rights of British America—for a pittance. Except for the bridge, which Jefferson considered to be one of the natural wonders of the world, a mirabile visu, the land around the bridge was not much arable…
M. Andrew Holowchak
June 11, 2024
Jefferson on Gentlemanly Farming Blog

Jefferson on Gentlemanly Farming

In The Gentleman Farmer, Being an Attempt to Improve Agriculture, By Subjecting It to the Test of Rational Principles, Lord Kames (Henry Home) distinguishes between the practice and the theory of farming. The former, which concerns only effects, is rightly a branch of Natural History. The latter, which concerns causes, is rightly a branch of Natural Philosophy. Most writers treat…
M. Andrew Holowchak
June 7, 2024
Jefferson v. Hamilton: A Northern versus Southern Feud? Blog

Jefferson v. Hamilton: A Northern versus Southern Feud?

As one enters Monticello, one is greeted by a bust of Jefferson facing a bust of Alexander Hamilton—“opposed in death as in life”—both by Italian sculptor Giuseppe Ceracchi. The statue of Hamilton is life-size, while the statue of Jefferson is a bit larger, and that suggests not merely Jefferson’s opposition, but political victory over Hamilton. What were the reasons for…
M. Andrew Holowchak
May 28, 2024
Jefferson vs. Hamilton, Again Blog

Jefferson vs. Hamilton, Again

During the French Revolutionary War, President George Washington asks Jefferson’s advice on whether the US ought to respect its treaties with the French government, which was a monarchy prior to the revolution and months after the clean divorcement of the head of King Charles XVI from his body. The request is sensible, for the government of France, formerly monocratic, promises…
M. Andrew Holowchak
May 2, 2024
Jefferson as the “Architect of American Liberty” Blog

Jefferson as the “Architect of American Liberty”

In Jefferson: Architect of American Liberty, (Basic Books, 2017), John B. Boles offers us another biography of Thomas Jefferson. In his brief introduction, he mentions that his aim is to present Jefferson as “politician, party leader, executive; architect, musician, oenophile, gourmand, traveler; inventor, historian, political theorist; land owner, farmer, slaveholder; and son, father, grandfather.” He cautions readers that his portrait…
M. Andrew Holowchak
April 23, 2024
Happy Birthday, Thomas Jefferson! Blog

Happy Birthday, Thomas Jefferson!

At the request of friend John Spear Smith (1785–1866, figure below), who named a newborn child after him, Thomas Jefferson, in a letter (21 Feb. 1825) that he pens some one and one-half years prior to his death, offers philosophical advice to the newborn child, Thomas Jefferson Smith. The missive takes the form of an epistolary trilogy: an advisory letter,…
M. Andrew Holowchak
April 12, 2024
Jefferson on “Nation Building” Blog

Jefferson on “Nation Building”

On July 19, 1823, Adamantios Koraïs—preeminent Greek scholar (1748–1833), philosopher of education, polyglot (Ancient Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Dutch, French, and English), and revolutionist—writes to Thomas Jefferson for “help from men truly free.” Circumstances in Greece are parlous. Greeks, under Turkic yoke since the middle of the fifteenth century, are in the midst of a revolution, begun in 1821, and Greeks…
M. Andrew Holowchak
April 5, 2024
What Did Jefferson Really Look Like? Blog

What Did Jefferson Really Look Like?

A newspaper in Chillicothe, Ohio, in 1887 and in 1902 stated that Sally Hemings’ last child, slave Eston Hemings, resembled Thomas Jefferson. Just how that resemblance was established is unclear. Eston Hemings died in 1877; Thomas Jefferson, in 1826. So, the newspaper was reporting that one person that had been dead for 10/25 years resembled another that has been dead…
M. Andrew Holowchak
March 27, 2024
Jefferson and the Indians Blog

Jefferson and the Indians

I came into possession of Anthony Wallace’s book, Jefferson and the Indians: American Indian Policy in the Formative Years on November 1, 2010. Since then, I have thrice tried to read the book, but I could never get beyond the introduction, and that, for me, is unusual, even when it comes to books, especially books on Jefferson. In his introduction,…
M. Andrew Holowchak
March 13, 2024
Thomas Jefferson’s “Holy War” Blog

Thomas Jefferson’s “Holy War”

In a singular letter late in life to John Wayles Eppes (6 Nov. 1813), Thomas Jefferson describes the American Revolution as a “holy war.” He writes, “If ever there was a holy war, it was that which saved our liberties and gave us independance.” The letter rather mundanely concerns Jefferson’s abhorrence of banks and paper money. The letter I consider…
M. Andrew Holowchak
February 20, 2024
How Northern Stupidity and Plundering Saved a Southern City Blog

How Northern Stupidity and Plundering Saved a Southern City

Lynchburg, Virginia, today displays many markers of its Civil War history. There are several signs in and around the city that indicate where Confederate forces were placed in defense of the city. There is a statue of a Confederate infantryman at the top of Monument Terrace. In Riverside Park, what is left of the hull of Marshall, which carried the…
M. Andrew Holowchak
February 8, 2024
Jefferson’s Use of Grids and Octagons was Racist? Blog

Jefferson’s Use of Grids and Octagons was Racist?

Irene Cheng's "The Racial Geometry of the Nation: Thomas Jefferson's Grids and Octagons" is indicative of the wokeist/Postmodernist plight of academic scholarship today vis-à-vis Thomas Jefferson. There is a smoothness to the essay and a structure, and there are sprinkled in several “technical” terms to give the essay quasi-intellectual feel. Yet that is on the level of “feel.” Careful critical…
M. Andrew Holowchak
January 23, 2024
Setting Aside Historical Accuracy Blog

Setting Aside Historical Accuracy

The recent video, “The Fall of Minneapolis,” by journalist Liz Collin and Dr. J.C. Chaix, is chillingly eye-opening. The documentary, following the book, “They’re Lying: The Media, The Left, and the Death of George Floyd, is painstakingly researched. It shows convincingly that the four officers, who were involved in the arrest of George Floyd on the day of his passing,…
M. Andrew Holowchak
January 8, 2024
Sally Hemings’ Bedroom Blog

Sally Hemings’ Bedroom

“Historians have made a discovery just in time for the July 4th holiday” (2018), writes Natalie Dreier of the National/World News. “They have found the living quarters for Sally Hemings, the enslaved woman who bore six children to one of the country’s founding fathers, Thomas Jefferson.” Where at Monticello is this bedroom? Michael Cottman of NBC News says that Hemings’ bedroom was…
M. Andrew Holowchak
December 13, 2023
Profiteering from Farcicality Blog

Profiteering from Farcicality

In August 2019, The New York Times, prompted by a notion of Nikole Hannah-Jones, began its 1619 Project—an attempt to rewrite completely America’s history by considering the year 1619 as the real birth of the American nation. In the words of New York Times Magazine editor-in-chief, Jay Silverstein: 1619 is not a year that most Americans know as a notable…
M. Andrew Holowchak
November 20, 2023
What Would Jefferson Do? Blog

What Would Jefferson Do?

One of the most difficult tasks of any historian is to show how knowing history is today relevant—that is, to show that history is heterotelic, that it is not its own end. The “Father of History,” the Greek Herodotus, who chronicled the events of the Persian War (490–479 B.C.) and aimed to cover both Greek and Persian motives, writes (my…
M. Andrew Holowchak
November 14, 2023
Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and the Attraction of Policial Decency Blog

Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and the Attraction of Policial Decency

Scholars are wont to paint antipodally Jefferson and Madison. Most depictions show, in effect, that by psychological disposition, Madison was better suited to be a Hamiltonian Federalist than a Jeffersonian Republican. I offer a few illustrations. Merrill D. Peterson, in his Thomas Jefferson and the New Nation, states that Madison had a “more penetrating mind, sharp, probing, and persistent,” while…
M. Andrew Holowchak
October 24, 2023
Thomas Jefferson, Architect BlogReview Posts

Thomas Jefferson, Architect

A review of Thomas Jefferson, Architect: Palladian Models, Democratic Principles, and the Conflict of Ideals (Yale, 2019) by Lloyd Dewitt, ed. Excluding the foreword and introduction, there are seven essays on Jefferson qua architect and a large number of plates at the book’s end. The book begins with Howard Burns’ “Thomas Jefferson, the Making of an Architect.” Burns aims at…
M. Andrew Holowchak
October 13, 2023
Master of the Metaphor Blog

Master of the Metaphor

“Nietzschean nuggets and verbal furbelows” in Henry Wiencek’s Master of the Mountain Henry Wiencek in his introduction to Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves begins metaphorically, “Thomas Jefferson’s mansion stands atop his mountain like the Platonic ideal of a house: a perfect creation existing in an ethereal realm, literally above the clouds.” And the metaphors just keep…
M. Andrew Holowchak
September 29, 2023
A “Proof” Gone Bad in the Jefferson Paternity Issue Blog

A “Proof” Gone Bad in the Jefferson Paternity Issue

After the 1998 DNA study in Nature indicted Thomas Jefferson apropos of the paternity of Eston Hemings and the rest of Sally Hemings’ children, the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation (hereafter, TJMF)—now merely the Thomas Jefferson Foundation—formed a committee to examine the DNA study and strands of historical evidence. In 2000, the foundation declared, “The DNA study, combined with multiple strands…
M. Andrew Holowchak
September 13, 2023
The Argument for Preserving Our Early American Symbols Blog

The Argument for Preserving Our Early American Symbols

Annie Gowan of The Washington Post writes of an incident a few years ago, June 2020, where a group of Portland, Oregon, protestors, gathered a high school and used bungee cords, wires, and human muscle to topple a statue of Thomas Jefferson off its pedestal and into the cement. Says 26-year-old removalist Triston Crowl, “When it came down, we could…
M. Andrew Holowchak
August 21, 2023
Assessing the Consilience Argument for Jefferson’s Paternity of Sally Hemings’ Children Blog

Assessing the Consilience Argument for Jefferson’s Paternity of Sally Hemings’ Children

It is too common today, vis-à-vis Jefferson’s avowed sexual involvement with Sally Hemings, to fall back on what I call the Consilience Argument: in effect, the argument everything (biological and historical evidence) argues for a relationship and nothing argues against it. That begins with the 2000 Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation’s 2000 study of the DNA evidence and historical evidence. They…
M. Andrew Holowchak
July 21, 2023
Jefferson and Moral Equality Blog

Jefferson and Moral Equality

In the prior section and independent of my argument on Jefferson’s first draft of his Declaration, I have shown that Jefferson observed there to be a rough sense of human equality while living in Colonial America, which did not have the social stratification of European countries. Yet the Colonists embraced the institution of slavery, where people, Whites and Blacks, were…
M. Andrew Holowchak
July 13, 2023
Jefferson and Equality Blog

Jefferson and Equality

From "The disease of liberty": Thomas Jefferson on History and Liberty (Wilmington, DE: Vernon Press, 2023) “All men are created equal,” I aim to show, is the axial “self-evidence truth” that Thomas Jefferson expresses in his Declaration of Independence. What, then, is one to make of the curious, unobvious claim? That cannot be answered until one expiscates what Jefferson means…
M. Andrew Holowchak
July 5, 2023
Jefferson’s Platonic Republicanism Blog

Jefferson’s Platonic Republicanism

Jefferson was never shy about his execration of Plato. He told John Adams (5 July 1814) that reading Plato’s Republic—fraught with whimsies, puerilities, and unintelligible jargon—was “the heaviest task-work I ever went through.” It is not so astonishing that Jefferson would have had such an unsympathetic, even hostile, view of Plato and his Republic, as Jefferson was a practical man…
M. Andrew Holowchak
June 28, 2023
Thomas Jefferson as a “Southern Cosmopolitan” Blog

Thomas Jefferson as a “Southern Cosmopolitan”

Xenophon in his Memorabilia (II.i.21–34) cites Prodicus’ account of Herakles (L., Hercules), “passing from boyhood to youth’s estate,” at a crossroads. He went to a quiet place to consider his course of life, when he was visited by two goddesses—Hēdonē (Pleasure) and Aretē (Virtue). “The one was fair to see and of high bearing; and her limbs were adorned with…
M. Andrew Holowchak
June 15, 2023
The Putrid Sink of Today’s Jeffersonian Scholarship Blog

The Putrid Sink of Today’s Jeffersonian Scholarship

Historians today with interest in historiography—what is often characterized simply and somewhat misleadingly as the history of history—seem to be in general agreement that the aims and methods of “historians” over millennia have changed. Study of history, as the argument goes, unquestionable shows that. There was yesterday’s history, there is today’s history, and there will be tomorrow’s history, and there…
M. Andrew Holowchak
June 8, 2023
Jefferson’s Plan for “Healthy” Cities Blog

Jefferson’s Plan for “Healthy” Cities

In a prior essay, “Thomas Jefferson’s Prophetic Anti-City Sentiments” (Abbeville), I wrote about Jefferson’s dislike of cities—the larger, the worse. In this essay, I discuss his plan making cities healthy—viz., if there must be cities, Jefferson’s plan for what we can do keep corruptions from them. Yellow fever, in 1793, struck Philadelphia, then the capitol of the United States. There…
M. Andrew Holowchak
May 30, 2023
Thomas Jefferson’s Prophetic Anti-City Sentiments Blog

Thomas Jefferson’s Prophetic Anti-City Sentiments

Thomas Jefferson, it is well known to historians, had marked anticity sentiments. “I am not a friend to placing growing men in populous cities,” writes Jefferson to Dr. Caspar Wistar (21 June 1807), “because they acquire there habits; partialities which do not contribute to the happiness of their after life.” Years earlier (23 Sept. 1800), he says to Dr. Benjamin…
M. Andrew Holowchak
May 18, 2023
The Moral Underpinning of Jeffersonian Republicanism Blog

The Moral Underpinning of Jeffersonian Republicanism

Liberty for Jefferson is a concept readily grasped, but one, he learns throughout the decades, of great difficulty in application. It is easy to understand what it means for government to be only minimally involved in the affairs of its citizens—to be involved in directing its foreign affairs and in protecting citizens’ liberties—but difficult to put into praxis such thin…
M. Andrew Holowchak
April 26, 2023
When Civil Rights Activism Runs Afoul Blog

When Civil Rights Activism Runs Afoul

In recent years, Thomas Jefferson, father of University of Virginia and first citizen of Charlottesville, has been the target of vitriolic assaults from countless persons, scholars among them, and groups in America. What is most surprising is that many of the assaults today come from persons or groups in or around his hometown, Charlottesville, where, one might expect, the citizens…
M. Andrew Holowchak
April 18, 2023
Could Jefferson Have Done More to End Slavery? Blog

Could Jefferson Have Done More to End Slavery?

It is today all too customarily asserted that anyone who owned slaves in the pageantry of American history was racist. The argument goes something like this: Slave-owning is a racist practice, so, anyone owning slaves is racist. There is, of course, much to unpack in the argument. First, it wrongly assumes that all slavery comprised Whites owning Blacks. Second, it…
M. Andrew Holowchak
April 6, 2023
The Establishment Love of “Racism” in Southern History Blog

The Establishment Love of “Racism” in Southern History

It is the task of historians to create what might be dubbed useful “fictions”—the “isms” of history, like colonialism, imperialism, liberalism, stadialism, and medialism. What is an ism? Philosopher and psychologist William James is noted for stating that an infant’s first experiences with the world are essentially “a blooming buzzing confusion.” As the infant matures and interacts with adults, he…
M. Andrew Holowchak
March 30, 2023
The University of Virginia Blog

The University of Virginia

Circumstantially Southern, Scientifically American (A Story Told in the Present Tense) When Thomas Jefferson retires from the presidency after his second term and following the example of George Washington, he cannot merely withdraw to his residence at Monticello and oversee his plantation. Retirement and withdrawal are not in his DNA, as it were. He does what he can do, while…
M. Andrew Holowchak
March 15, 2023
Was Randolph Jefferson Just a “Muddy Boots Farmer”? Blog

Was Randolph Jefferson Just a “Muddy Boots Farmer”?

In 2011, Bernard Mayo edited the collection of letters between Thomas Jefferson and younger brother Randolph in Thomas Jefferson and His Unknown Brother Randolph. In the short book, Mayo proffers a four-page introduction to the thin correspondence. The letters exchanged, says Mayo, “are primarily interesting because they reveal Thomas Jefferson’s solicitousness: his “affection, patient kindness, and desire to help a…
M. Andrew Holowchak
March 6, 2023
The No-So-Enlightened Patriarch of Monticello Blog

The No-So-Enlightened Patriarch of Monticello

A Review of Annette Gordon-Reed and Peter Onuf’s Most Blessed of the Patriarchs (Liveright, 2016) by M. Andrew Holowchak While Pete Onuf’s somewhat incoherent 2007 book on Jefferson, The Mind of Thomas Jefferson—it is mere a rag-tag collection of his thoughts on various topics related to Jefferson—betrays unsubtly a bitter, even angry, Onuf, intent in belittling Jefferson, his 2016 collaboration…
M. Andrew Holowchak
March 2, 2023
A Jefferson Styled Love Letter Blog

A Jefferson Styled Love Letter

Thomas Jefferson was never comfortable in allowing direct expression of his emotions. When he did, the results were general catastrophic—e.g., his tongue-tied attempts at expressing his love as a youth to Rebecca Burwell and his seeming inability emotionally to recover himself after the passing of his wife Martha on September 6, 1782. Jefferson eventually accepted a post as delegate to…
M. Andrew Holowchak
February 14, 2023
Did Thomas Jefferson Have a Sexual Relationship with Bob Hemings? Blog

Did Thomas Jefferson Have a Sexual Relationship with Bob Hemings?

The children of Elizabeth “Betty” Hemings—a slave owned by Thomas Jefferson’s father-in-law, John Wayles, a white English sea captain—occupied a special place at Jefferson’s Monticello. That might be because six of Betty’s 10 children—Robert, James, Thenia, Critta, Peter, and Sally—were said to be fathered by John Wayles. Yet we do not know about paternity in either case. Much depends on…
M. Andrew Holowchak
January 17, 2023
The Glory Days of the Kanawha Canal Blog

The Glory Days of the Kanawha Canal

Southern essayist and former Lynchburger Dr. George W. Bagby (1828–1883) described departure of one of the bateaux on a trip from Richmond to Lynchburg on the Kanawha Canal, while he was then a lad, in a short piece titled “Canal Reminiscences”: At last we were off, slowly pushed along under the bridge on Seventh Street; then the horses were hitched…
M. Andrew Holowchak
January 9, 2023
Thomas Jefferson and the Proper End of a Good Life Blog

Thomas Jefferson and the Proper End of a Good Life

After giving a talk on Jefferson's conceptions of reason and the moral sense at UVa (11 Apr. 2015), a gentleman brought up the issue of slavery and mentioned how he found unpalatable Jefferson’s repeated claim, especially later in life, that he refused to do more to eliminate the heinous institution because the time was not yet right. The gentleman, of…
M. Andrew Holowchak
January 2, 2023
A “Cretinous” Construal of Jefferson’s “Diffusion Argument” Blog

A “Cretinous” Construal of Jefferson’s “Diffusion Argument”

While attending a talk at Poplar Forest on Thomas Jefferson and the Missouri Crisis in the summer of 2019, the speaker, a historian at one of the local universities in Lynchburg, broached Jefferson’s letter to Congressman John Holmes (22 Apr. 1820) about eradication of the institution of slavery by diffusion. This historian called the argument, without further commentary, pure poppycock.…
M. Andrew Holowchak
December 6, 2022
Indentured Servitude in Early America Blog

Indentured Servitude in Early America

French politician and author Jean-Nicholas Démeunier, in 1786, published his Essai sur les États-Unis. Prior to its publication, the essay, intended for Encyclopédie Méthodique, was in the words of Jefferson’s secretary William Short in a letter to William Nelson (25 Oct. 1786), “as false as might be expected from a man who had made the Abbe Raynal his model, and…
M. Andrew Holowchak
April 8, 2022
“Moral the Question Certainly is Not” Blog

“Moral the Question Certainly is Not”

Filmmaker Arlen Parsa has recently undertaken a project that blots out the faces of all the signers of the Declaration of Independence in John Trumbull’s famous painting “The Declaration of Independence.” The stunt has unsurprisingly gained the filmmaker much notoriety. While the project might seem to have been a frivolous undertaking for Parsa—something to pass the time in these Coronavirus…
M. Andrew Holowchak
March 3, 2022
Is the Public Getting a Skewed Idea of Thomas Jefferson? Blog

Is the Public Getting a Skewed Idea of Thomas Jefferson?

This article was originally published by History News Network. In a recent article on Thomas Jefferson’s mythic and contradictory legacy for Time, Joseph Ellis begins with an account of an encounter during a book tour with an outraged woman. She snaps: “Mr. Ellis, you are a mere pigeon on the great statue of Thomas Jefferson.” Ellis has a decisive retort.…
M. Andrew Holowchak
October 2, 2015
Was Jefferson a “Scientific Racist”? Review Posts

Was Jefferson a “Scientific Racist”?

Originally published by the History News Network, 11 November 2014. “In one of my seminar discussions,” writes UVA professor Peter Onuf (now emeritus) in The Mind of Thomas Jefferson, “one young woman described suddenly feeling the she ‘did not belong here,’ that Jefferson was telling her that there was no place for her in his ‘academical village.’ ” He continues,…
M. Andrew Holowchak
April 14, 2015
Searching for Jefferson and Finding Ourselves Blog

Searching for Jefferson and Finding Ourselves

Why Historians Cannot Readily Situate Jefferson Finding Jefferson’s Shadow In his watershed work The Jefferson Image in the American Mind (1961), Merrill D. Peterson argues that our task as Jeffersonian historians is in some sense Sisyphean. Aiming to situate Jefferson—to find the real Jefferson—we merely wind up with an image, a shad-ow, which is as obfuscatory as it is disconcerting.…
M. Andrew Holowchak
January 13, 2015
“Monster of Self-Deception” or “Sentimental Traveller”? Review Posts

“Monster of Self-Deception” or “Sentimental Traveller”?

A Critique of Onufian Revisionism and Jefferson’s “Contradictions” Robert Booth Fowler writes: “The monuments to Stalin that have come down in recent years in Eastern Europe mark the fall of a former hero and the fall of the values the hero supposedly embodied. The situation with Jefferson, however, is different. The values celebrated by the Jefferson Memorial have not lost…
M. Andrew Holowchak
December 9, 2014
An Easy Moral Superiority over Our Dead Heroes Blog

An Easy Moral Superiority over Our Dead Heroes

This article was originally published by the History News Network and is reprinted here by permission. Henry Wiencek’s Master of the Mountain (2012), which depicted Jefferson as a greedy and racist slave-owner, sold well but was given an ambivalent reception. Though the book has been fairly well received by the general public,its author has been censured severely by Jeffersonian scholars…
M. Andrew Holowchak
December 2, 2014