Thomas Kidd on Thomas Jefferson, a Man of Contradictions

In a day when the founding fathers of the United States either are elevated with paeans of praise or have fallen from grace among the woke, it’s hard to find balanced treatments of people like Thomas Jefferson. The fathers are so easy to criticize if you look into their lives deeply enough, and yet there is something about what they accomplished in founding a new nation on countercultural social and political principles that feeds our never-fading longing for heroes. In that light, if you’re looking for an honest treatment of a complicated figure in American history, Thomas Kidd’s Thomas Jefferson: A Biography of Flesh and Spirit (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2022) is well worth your time.

Kidd does not aim to write a popular hagiography of Jefferson but seeks to portray him in the details of who he was and how he thought. He doesn’t shy away from his failures, even as he shows what made him so influential and significant in his day. All in all, Kidd presents Jefferson as a man of troubling contradictions.

One of the most important elements of Kidd’s biography is its attention to Jefferson’s religious interest. Ever the intellectual and bibliophile, Jefferson sought to obtain all manner of books on religion, even showing interest in an English translation of the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Old Testament from the intertestamental period (for an introduction to the Septuagint, see Gregory Lanier and William Ross, The Septuagint: What It Is and Why It Matters, a book published by Crossway, my employer). Jefferson famously created his own versions of the New Testament, seeking to find “the historical Jesus” before the quest for the historical Jesus became a cottage industry. 

Jefferson’s religious interest, which regularly went astray of orthodox Christianity (even though Kidd says that he considered himself a “Christian” in some sense), led him to champion religious freedom, most significantly in the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, which set the stage for how religious freedom would come to be defined in the new nation. This concept granted minority Christian groups the freedom to gather and worship without being imprisoned or punished, while it also stopped government money flowing to churches. It’s a fascinating irony of history that when many enemies labeled Jefferson an atheist and skeptic, Baptists in the day supported him in droves because he promoted freedom of religion, giving words to the cause in Virginia and then encouraging the movement as president. Jefferson’s curtailment of established religion thus ironically promoted religion by freeing it from governmental constraints. Perhaps most striking in Kidd’s biography is just how much the language of the Bible—even obscure passages from the Old Testament Prophets—infused the language of Jefferson the skeptic.

Jefferson’s contradictions are perhaps best seen in a few other areas of his life and thought. Ironically, this father of freedom both enslaved other humans and enslaved himself to others through debt. These two themes of slavery and debt punctuate Kidd’s biography of Jefferson, helping readers get a fairer view of the man in his failings. 

On the slavery front, Kidd shows how Jefferson believed that slavery would eventually have to end in America, and he hoped that it indeed would. At some points in his life, he supported measures to encourage its end, but more often than not, he made no action against it at all beyond philosophizing. Instead, he participated in it and benefited from it immensely. He could have used his position as a Southern aristocrat to point in a new direction, but he ultimately found that such action would demand him to go too much against the grain of his Southern culture.

And then there’s his infidelity with Sally Hemings. Jefferson’s sexual relationship with Sally Hemings again displayed the contradictions in Jefferson’s life. Despite having relations with her and fathering children by her, Jefferson publicly decried the amalgamation of the races, saying how deplorable it was. That is—to play on Kidd’s subtitle—his spirit was against it, but his flesh was not. Jefferson was echoing the sentiments of many Southern landowners who, like Jefferson, also kept their enslaved Black concubines. 

Kidd’s biography also shows how remarkably bad Jefferson was with managing money. Perhaps the root of the problem came from his expectation that a man of his social standing and position should have beautiful properties, the finest of things from Europe, and books, books, and more books. In other words, he wanted what he wanted and wasn’t going to let his budget constrain him. Selling his library to Congress after the British burned the Library of Congress, then housed in the US Capitol, in 1814 brought him some much-needed debt relief, but he torpedoed his economic state by cosigning a loan for a friend just before the Panic of 1819. Jefferson’s poor handling of money had a devastating effect on his slaves after his death, many of whom were sold to pay down his debt. His greed wreaked havoc on the lives of many in his household.

One can find all kinds of other details about Jefferson in Kidd’s biography, such as his intellectual development, his rivalry with Patrick Henry (about whom Kidd has also written a biography), his falling out with George Washington (a rift never healed before Washington’s death), his diplomatic stint in France, his presidential accomplishments (most significantly, the Louisiana Purchase) and presidential failings (especially during his second term), and his famed correspondence with John Adams. Readers will benefit from Kidd’s treatment of all these matters and more, though I especially appreciated his discussions of religion, slavery, and debt—the last of which perhaps receives insufficient attention.

I read Jon Meacham’s biography of Jefferson some years ago and found it engaging and illuminating. Meacham is a strong writer who is able to present the details of his subject with richness in a compelling way. And Meacham also recognized Jefferson’s flaws. But readers do walk away from Meacham’s book—titled with the machismo title Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power—feeling a bit more positive about Jefferson than readers of Kidd’s Thomas Jefferson: A Biography of Flesh and Spirit. Yet Kidd (also a strong writer who traffics in the details of the past) makes a strong case for the historical Jefferson as a conflicted figure full of contradictions, and he helpfully brings to the surface how throughout his life he nursed a longstanding fascination with all things religious.