Thomas Jefferson Survives

American Independence in His Time and Ours
On the 250th anniversary of his greatest achievement, two leading historians take on the question, Does Thomas Jefferson still matter?
Fifty years after signing the Declaration of Independence, John Adams reassured the nation from his deathbed, Thomas Jefferson survives. Unaware that Jefferson had died hours earlier, Adams was in a larger sense correct: Jefferson had been immortalised in the American imagination. Today, Jefferson has effectively become a partisan talismanjettisoned by the left for his moral failings, embraced and repurposed by the right as an avatar of white nationalism. Dissatisfied with the reductive clichs that now define Jeffersons legacy, Peter S. Onuf and Francis D. Cogliano restore the founding father to his historical context, elucidating how Jeffersons understanding of history shaped his responses to the crises of his time, how he conceived of the physical entity that b