The SAR MAGAZINE is the official quarterly publication of the National Society of the Sons of the American Revolution published quarterly.
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SAR Conference on the American Revolution Thomas Jefferson's Lives: Learning from History By Dr. David E. Schrader, Philadelphia Continental Chapter, PASSAR, Major Robert Kirkwood Chapter, DESSAR T he 2012 SAR Annual Conference on the American Revolution took place in Charlottesville, Va., June 22-14, 2012. The topic of the conference was "Thomas Jefferson's Lives: Biography as a Construction of History." Charlottesville, Jefferson's city and home of Jefferson's university, was a wonderfully fitting setting for the conference. Most of the sessions were held at The Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello. The conference was dedicated to Professor Peter S. Onuf, Thomas Jefferson Foundation Professor of History at the University of Virginia, widely regarded as the dean of contemporary Jefferson Studies. The co-organizers of the conference were SAR Treasurer General and SAR Conference Director Joseph W. Dooley, and SAR Distinguished Scholar and Associate Professor of History at the U.S. Military Academy Robert M.S. McDonald. The conference attendees included a mix of the world's leading Jefferson scholars and other interested people, including several SAR members. Among those in attendance were Maurizio Valsania (University of Torino, Italy), author of The Limits of Optimism: Thomas Jefferson's Dualistic Enlightenment, Frank Cogliano (University of Edinburgh, Scotland), author of Thomas Jefferson: Reputation and Legacy, and Jon Meacham, whose biography of Jefferson will be published this fall, and who was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Biography in 2009 for American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House. In addition to Drs. McDonald and Cogliano, papers were presented by Annette Gordon-Reed (Harvard), Joanne Freeman (Yale), Barbara Oberg (Princeton), Gordon Wood (Brown), Herbert Sloan (Columbia), Jan Ellen Lewis (Rutgers), Richard Bernstein (New York University), Brian Steele 6800(5 Jefferson. Where Jefferson's fans viewed Jefferson as a man of brilliant political skills, his detractors viewed him as a conniving manipulator. Something that surprised me, although it might not have been surprising to the academic historians, was that none of the featured biographies written before 1950 was written by someone with academic training in history. The earlier biographies tended to be written by journalists or simply people who had acquired a fascination with Jefferson. I suspect that this may have contributed to a situation wherein Jefferson's literary repute tended to vary considerably with the political winds of differing times. A number of the assembled scholars noted distinct periods or stages in Jefferson's historical reputation. Jefferson tended to be held in (University of Alabama at Birmingham), Richard Samuelson (California State University, San Bernardino), Andrew Burstein and Nancy Isenberg (both Louisiana State University), Christine Coalwell McDonald (Tuxedo Park School), and J. Jefferson Looney (Monticello). The papers presented provided a chronological overview of Jefferson biographies written between 1837, only 11 years after Jefferson's death, and 1981. The basic premise of the conference was that biographies of major historical figures construct images of history. Not surprisingly, some biographers write in order to advance some particular personal or political agenda, while other biographers are more disciplined by the scholarly ideal of even-handed criticism. It is surely to be expected, for example, that the 1871 biography, The Domestic Life of Thomas Jefferson: Compiled from Family Letters, written by Jefferson's great-granddaughter, Sara Nicholas Randolph, sought to portray Jefferson as a near-saintly ancestor whose voice was never raised in anger. It is also to be expected that biographers of Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr would paint profoundly less flattering portraits of particularly high esteem during the period from his death to the Civil War, a period in which the dominant political party in the United States was of Jefferson's creation. Jefferson was held in lower repute in the period following the Civil War, when the dominant political emphasis was on a stronger federal government. Jefferson experienced something of a resurrection in the 1920s, when political writers supporting the Democratic Party attempted to portray that party as the heirs of Jefferson while casting their Republican opponents as the heirs of Alexander Hamilton. This was especially noteworthy in the three volumes of Jefferson biography (1925-1945) by Claude Bowers. Two features seem to predominate in the past 50 years of Jefferson biography. One is the fact that academically trained historians have come to play a major role in Jefferson studies and Jefferson biography. It may be noteworthy that the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, founded in 1923, the foundation that owns and operates Monticello, endowed The Thomas Jefferson Foundation Professorship in Continued on page 23