Seven Virginians, the culmination of a lifetime of erudition by one of America's leading historians, reveals the integral role played by seven major Virginians before, during, and after the American Revolution: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, George Mason, Patrick Henry, and John Marshall.
Most accounts of the founding generation focus only on the activities of the 'big three'—Washington, Jefferson, and Madison—but Boles incorporates the key contributions of these other four important figures to the political and legal structures that govern the United States to this day. At the same time, Boles is clear-eyed about the Revolutionary generation's problems and their fading from the scene, inaugurating the beginnings of Virginia's political decline in the early nineteenth century. In so doing, Boles provides the crucial Virginian piece to the ongoing reevaluation of the United States's founding moment
From an eminent scholar of the American South, the first full-scale biography of Thomas Jefferson since 1970
Not since Merrill Peterson's Thomas Jefferson and the New Nation has a scholar attempted to write a comprehensive biography of the most complex Founding Father. In Jefferson, John B. Boles plumbs every facet of Thomas Jefferson's life, all while situating him amid the sweeping upheaval of his times. We meet Jefferson the politician and political thinker-as well as Jefferson the architect, scientist, bibliophile, paleontologist, musician, and gourmet. We witness him drafting of the Declaration of Independence, negotiating the Louisiana Purchase, and inventing a politics that emphasized the states over the federal government-a political philosophy that shapes our national life to this day.
Boles offers new insight into Jefferson's actions and thinking on race. His Jefferson is not a hypocrite, but a tragic figure-a man who could not hold simultaneously to his views on abolition, democracy, and patriarchal responsibility. Yet despite his flaws, Jefferson's ideas would outlive him and make him into nothing less than the architect of American liberty.
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