Salon.com > biographies http://www.salon.com Thu, 20 Jun 2013 00:40:43 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 Who is the real Thomas Jefferson? http://www.salon.com/2012/12/03/the_thomas_jefferson_wars/ http://www.salon.com/2012/12/03/the_thomas_jefferson_wars/#comments Mon, 03 Dec 2012 18:30:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=13113481 The firestorm over author Henry Wiencek’s unsparing portrait of Thomas Jefferson, "Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves," has taken to the pages of the New York Times and other media outlets with a vengeance. Amid tepid praise for Jon Meacham’s folksy best-seller,  "Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power," which skirts the complex world of slavery, it is Wiencek’s hubristic treatment that has returned Jefferson to center stage in historians’ long-standing war over whom to blame first and foremost for our racist underpinnings as a nation.

Wiencek seizes upon stray notes in Jefferson’s hand in which the Virginia planter performs cold calculations on the monetary value of slaves. A Scrooge-like Jefferson becomes cruel and uncivilized as he obsesses over the slave economy – which he comes to see as a “convenient engine” of American growth. You don’t remove the human face from slavery and come out ahead. But that is what Henry Wiencek has done to Thomas Jefferson.

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