Peter Onuf and Francis Cogliano’s latest book slander defenders of Thomas Jefferson in the worst possible manner. Was it really necessary?

by Shaun Kenney

I was looking forward to reading Peter Onuf and Francis Cogliano’s Thomas Jefferson Survives right up until page 12 of the Introduction.

Once upon a time, I had the pleasure of reading Jeffersonian Legacies in my younger days as a consumer of all things Virginia history, which was the result of a conference on Jefferson headed up by Onuf.

The late Daniel P. Jordan — whose long tenure with the Thomas Jefferson Foundation helped shape the Jeffersonian renaissance — capstoned the conference celebrating Mr. Jefferson’s 250th birthday with the following tribute:

While the conference and essays allow fresh voices to be heard on aspects of the Jefferson legacy, good and bad, at times they merely echo partisan arguments about Jefferson’s life and politics going back to his own era; in other ways they provide a 1990s standard of judgment. The centrality and complexity of Jefferson’s ideas and career, his extraordinary versatility, his gift of felicitous prose, and the exceptional corpus of letters he left behind will assure that Jefferson will remain a fascinating and compelling subject to examine and ponder for edification and inspiration, for admiration and admonishment, for generations to come.

For those interested in how profound the shift has been on Jefferson from paragon to parasite, Ken Burns is your answer. His 1997 Thomas Jefferson documentary treats Jefferson as a Founding Father, yet his 2026 documentary on The American Revolution only begrudgingly admits George Washington as the indispensable man. In fact, all of the accomplishments of the Founding Fathers are footnotes rather than pivotal moments in history — and if pivotal, then most certainly imperfect. From this treatment, Jefferson has provided a deep mine from which countless historians have delved and picked apart to exhibit and even invent the very worst of imperfections in an industry rewarding grievance. God forbid to see what a Ken Burns documentary on Jefferson would look like today.

What should fascinate and compel us presently at the 200th anniversary of Jefferson’s death and the 250th birthday of these States United is that Jordan’s commitment to pluralism and the collision of ideas has been eclipsed by a 2020-ish standard of judgment seeking to recapture Jefferson for the 21st century political left — or worse still, abandon Jefferson to a caricature and label it as “far right”, a tactic which has proven to be very useful to organizations such as the SPLC.

Jefferson’s legacy and false dichotomies

Of course, critiquing Peter Onuf is no small task, as he is perhaps at present the premier historian on the life of Thomas Jefferson and his legacy into the present day. This is no small boast, as not only is he the inheritor of the tradition laid down by such luminaries as Dumas Malone whose six-volume biography of Jefferson remains unparalleled, but who has been succeeded at the University of Virginia by the inestimable Alan Taylor whose books I cannot recommend more highly: Thomas Jefferson’s Education is a book I have thrust upon my daughters, and The Infernal Enemy which remains an excellent and insightful volume on the mindset of Virginians during the Federal era. I’m sure Dr. Onuf is a wonderful human being in person and would love to disagree with him (and others) without the contaminant of being disagreeable.

So goes the preface. Into the Onuf and Cogliano’s introduction, as they explain how Jefferson’s legacy has been borrowed, appropriated, and fostered over the last two centuries — most notably by Franklin D. Roosevelt who championed Jefferson’s reputation in service to 20th-century New Deal liberalism as an enlightened figure, only for the political left to take a more recent and socialist turn by which Jefferson was not progressive enough for 21st-century tastes:

In recent years the American political left has largely jettisoned Jefferson. For his critics, Jefferson is no longer seen as the man who articulated the “American creed” but rather as a plantation patriarch and enslaver who epitomizes the hypocrisy of the founders of the American republic.

Onuf and Cogliano include an endnote here. Their source? The 1619 Project — critics certainly, but by no means mainstream.

Yet Jefferson most certainly does have his mainstream critics, adjacent to the spirit of the so-called 1619 Project (and masterfully refuted by Peter Wood’s The 1620 Project and reshaped by far superior narratives such as Joseph Kelly’s Marooned) and sympathetic to the task of reducing the Great Men of History (TM) to constructivist assessments in the spirit of Michel Foucault.

Here’s where the heartburn begins:

As Jefferson’s stock declined on the left, he was taken up by the right — and embraced and repurposed as an avatar of white nationalism (sic). . .

Trump’s and DeSantis’s celebrations of Jefferson were reminiscent of Roosevelt’s in 1936. Indeed, their positive views of Jefferson sit nicely within the Apostle of Freedom version of Jefferson that was a mainstream view in the middle of the twentieth century. But unlike Roosevelt, Trump ascribed Jefferson’s beliefs to his supporters, not to all Americans, excoriating those who disagreed with his version of American history. . . .

For Trump and many of his followers, Jefferson is no longer a synecdoche for America or a spokesman for universal liberty. Jefferson is instead seen through the narrow, sectarian lens of reactionary populism. He has been reduced to a partisan talisman.

One of the best and imperceptible ways to detect the presence of bovine excrement is to make the argument in reverse. Jefferson has become a partisan talisman. Jefferson is the Apostle of Reactionary Populism. Jefferson is defended by Trump (egads!) and DeSantis (horror!) in the wake of the SPLC-driven 2017 riots.

For those who see the play coming, the insinuation remains. Jefferson’s flaws are by extension Trump’s virtues and the policy of a reactionary populism. Jefferson’s legacy — if swallowed whole — somehow implies an endorsement of his vices as well, and the intentional admixture of Roosevelt’s admiration with present day sentiments regarding the Founding Fathers as flawed men whose dreams and achievements rested upon the backs of an oppressed underclass. To vindicate Jefferson is to absolve his vices; to defend Jefferson’s memory is to repudiate the arc of history which the revisionists claim to be Jefferson’s cardinal virtue pulling him out of the mire of disgust and contempt.

Also — Orange Man bad, so Jefferson also bad. QED, guys.

Jefferson, casuistry, and special pleading

Would that such pedestrian casuistry merely amuse rather than offend. Yet Onuf and Cogliano attempt to create a grand unified theory regarding Jefferson’s legacy, namely his belief that each generation be allowed to enact a new constitution and not bind the previous ones — evidence that Jefferson’s “arc of history” is the true key to unlock and save Jefferson from the dustbin of history.

One could rightly raise the point on how Jefferson’s commitment to democracy and revolution while out of power discovered within itself a radical commitment to both tradition and reaction once the Jeffersonian Republicans obtained power — yet such realizations only interrupt Onuf and Cogliano’s attempt to midwife an alliance between democracy and tradition — one which will ultimately fall flat. What is ignored in the shotgun marriage is that democracy, in its purest form, is by nature ruthlessly both reactionary and populist, and readers were previously assured by both historians that this is very bad. Why observe property rights or any “intergenerational peace plan” — our euphemism for tradition — if the rules can change at the whim of a demagogue and whatever mob they inspire in the name of false gods? Or are we only concerned about their demagogues while our democracy must be preserved?

Or — and I am just spitballing here — perhaps the best intergenerational peace plan is the one crafted by James Madison? This in spite of Jefferson’s perhaps temporary and convenient admiration for the sans-coullets in revolutionary France?

Sadly, they save the best insinuations for last:

Each “living generation,” Jefferson insisted, must reconstitute itself as a people, responsible for sustaining “a more perfect union” across time. But Americans are not shirking that responsibility, taking their status as a people for granted and failing to recognize that republican self-government is a great and ongoing experiment. Rather than following the example of the revolutionaries who launched that experiment, many patriotic Americans imagine that a providentially sanctioned new nation miraculously emerged from the war in the nation-making worlds of the Declaration. They assume that the republic is fixed and permanent. Assuming an enduring collective identity, they look back to the founding and find strikingly familiar images of themselves in Jefferson and his fellow founders. (emphasis added)

Those who defend Thomas Jefferson’s legacy against his critics do so because they find “strikingly familiar images” in the Founders themselves. What are those images again? Onuf and Cogliano tell us up front what Jefferson’s defenders really intend for his legacy, not an honest defense of a Founding Father, but darkly hidden and barely whispered prejudice that is “embrace[s] and repurpose[s] [Jefferson] as an avatar of white nationalism.” Jefferson’s prejudices are modern-day GOP policies, don’t you see? The veil is torn, the true nature of those-who-disagree is exposed to the harshness of their daylight, and only from this place can we — and Onuf and Cogliano — declare that our discussion can truly begin.

This is where I close the book.

One wishes their argument include the courtesy of a steel man response from those who defend Jefferson’s legacy without the caricature of being crypto-fascists. Certainly such defenders exist, and the implication that those who defend a more robust interpretation Jefferson’s legacy are, in fact, apologists for white supremacy or tools of political hatchetmen in service to the Civitas Terrena is in its best light within the “the grip of anachronistic characterization and special pleading” — words which Onuf and Cogliano claim their argument seeks to escape, but only within the straitjacket they offer to the reader.

This is no olive branch, but a false dichotomy designed to identify an “us” at the expense of a “them” — good guys against terrible guys. In short, the very special pleading they put upon a mercurially crafted opposition.

America’s founding fathers and the great men of history

One supposes this passes for insight in certain quarters. After all, it is entirely avant garde for small thinkers to earn a name by tearing down great ones.

For instance, Winston Churchill continues to be the victim of both hagiography and pathography, starting with Churchill’s own hand (or the hands of his ghostwriters) in his history of the Second World War only for the shockingly unethical reveal and counter position by Lord Moran — Churchill’s own physician — in 1966, opening the floodgates to Churchill’s critics great and small.

Jefferson would never be immune to such attacks and re-evaluations. Fawn Brodie’s psychoanalysis in the 1970s has been largely superseded by reformers such as Andrew Burstein whose Being Thomas Jefferson begins as an attempt — and Burstein has the epistemic humility to see that the effort is indeed an exploration and attempt — to bridge Brodie’s psychoanalysis with Malone’s magisterial work. Yet Brodie’s work was not the first fusillade against the reputation of the Sage of Monticello. That honorific goes to none other than U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall whose five-volume The Life of George Washington excoriated the Jeffersonian Republicans against what Marshall would perhaps term the “reactionary populism” of what he saw as a Jacobin-inspired rejection of the hard-earned Federalist status quo — particularly with regards to the courts and the rule of law. Even in life, James Callander who once embellished the Jefferson reputation only to attempt to destroy it with his Jeffersoniad series after being refused key positions in the new order of things after Jefferson’s election to the presidency, who as late as fifty years after the publication of Callander’s screeds Jefferson’s own granddaughter Ellen Wayles Randolph Coolidge pronounced that there were such things as moral impossibilities.

By no means I am suggesting that Onuf and Cogliano are in the same school as James Callender. Yet one cannot help but extend a long and crooked finger at the spirit of the times, haunted by the specter of the 1619 Project and exemplified by the present-day excoriation of the Founding Fathers in general — and the attempt to dismantle the Great Men of History theory in principle.

For those unfamiliar with the argument, Great Men of History will argue that history is indeed moved by great individuals who — given the moral and extraordinary choice for leadership — choose to lead. By contrast is the “history from below” thesis, which will argue that Great Men only have the opportunity to lead not because they were great, but because of their times. Thus Churchill in May 1940 was the product of history and not exemplar. Thus the Founding Fathers were the product of socio-economic circumstance and not moral force.

The grounding goes deeper than this, I’m afraid, because if one buys the idea that Great Men and Founding Fathers are circumstances of time, environment, and economy, then who are truly responsible for the great moments of history? The answer is those who put the men in positions to become great — and in the American experience, that is going to be not just the men, women, slaves, “indigenous peoples” (and is there any more loathsome and condescending postmodern phrase than to call a people merely indigenous as if they were the victims of history without autonomy or power of their own? Anathema sit), economies, power structures, circumstances, and so forth. All agency is removed as if we were reviving the Soviet-era doctrine of scientific history, where all history magically bends towards progress and justice just because that’s just what economies and societies do.

Greatness doesn’t have to be perfect in order to be good

The problem with this is that the Great Men of History are indeed great, not because they had the opportunities to be great, but because they chose to be great in the moment. Churchill could have listened to Lord Halifax. Washington could have defended the British Crown. Jefferson felt the choice as well and put it in his own words:

“[W]hen I recollect that at 14. years of age, the whole care & direction of myself was thrown on myself entirely, without a relation or friend qualified to advise or guide me, and recollect the various sorts of bad company with which I associated from time to time, I am astonished I did not turn off with some of them, & become as worthless to society as they were. . . .

“[F]rom the circumstances of my position I was often thrown into the society of horse racers, cardplayers, foxhunters, scientific & professional men, and of dignified men; and many a time have I asked myself, in the enthusiastic moment of the death of a fox, the victory of a favorite horse, the issue of a question eloquently argued at the bar or in the great council of the nation, well, which of these kinds of reputation should I prefer? that of a horse jockey? a foxhunter? an Orator? or the honest advocate of my country’s rights?”

The entire letter is a repudiation of “history from the bottom” and well worth your time to read it in full. Jefferson knew what sort of person he wanted to become despite the temptation to satisfy his appetites and be as worthless as his peers — and he very well could have done so.

This is the distinction between greatness and mediocrity. It is near impossible to think of how the American War for Independence would have been successfully prosecuted without Washington. Does anyone truly see the British Empire standing alone without Churchill? Who among the Founding Fathers writes the Declaration of Independence other than Thomas Jefferson?

Perhaps we should consider more deeply the opportunities individuals receive to become great who decline the offer? Who choose leisure over their studies, appetites to happiness, put themselves over others, and choose disintegration over integrity?

How many Jeffersons have been lost? How many Washingtons? Perhaps more important to ask — who is at fault?

Only those whose time it is for choosing.

Even deeper than this is the question as to whether or not Jefferson or Washington or Churchill — knowing they would be reviled by those who demand synchronicity out of the perfect and the good — would have chosen to make moral choices knowing their lives and decisions would be tortured by historians? The hagiographers create marble men, yet the error committed is that neither Churchill nor Washington nor Jefferson needed to be perfect in order to be honored, nor were any of them perfect men — but they did achieve good in the world, and that is what matters.

The world is better for May 1940, for Yorktown, and for the Declaration of Independence, and we are better for those who chose to expand the sphere of human freedom despite the adolescent ingratitude of its inheritors. Perfect is not the standard. In fact, there is a great deal of good in the world that isn’t perfect but is only good because it is — even imperfectly — directed towards and striving for an end which is Good. So too are America’s Founding Fathers.

America doesn’t have to be perfect in order to be loved. Our Founding Fathers do not have to be perfect in order to be honored. Neither does Thomas Jefferson need to be turned into a demigod in order to be admired, appreciated, and respected.

Pace Thomas Jefferson

Jefferson prevails — and he prevails for many reasons. Onuf and Cogliano both remark that unlike Roosevelt who made Jefferson for all of us, present day defenders of Jefferson and by extension the U.S. Constitution, the Founding Fathers, and an antiquarian view of America which runs contrary to the present narrative of revisionist historians all do so perhaps not out of animus but most certainly out of a barely concealed prejudice based in racial superiority thinly veneered by an antiquated patriotism.

Such straw men are easy targets for the pyromaniacs, but hardly useful. In fact, one might even helpfully suggest that Roosevelt’s imagination of the Jeffersonian legacy is indeed the problem. Jefferson is not for all of us. Jefferson is not the common inheritance of every American. Rather, Jefferson’s legacy is for most of us — if at the very least some of us.

Former President Ronald Reagan put the question best:

It is time that we ask ourselves if we still know the freedoms that were intended for us by the Founding Fathers and if we will pass on to these young people the freedoms we knew in our youth, because freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. It has to be fought for and defended by each generation.

Jefferson’s legacy of self-government in the face of those who “know best” remains his contribution to the inheritance Americans receive from the Founding Fathers.

That Jefferson did not perfectly adhere to his own aspirations can be studied and considered, but that Jefferson articulated those aspirations and put them into words each American can recognize as the freedom to achieve freedom — that is remarkable and unprecedented in the history of the world.

Jefferson gave us a horizon line, not a utopia. Those who honor Jefferson’s memory and example are not the troglodytes or crypto-fascists their enemies — and they are enemies by their own admission — cage them as, but rather they are defending the promise and tradition of human freedom in the face of those who see in that promise either a mere accident of history or a zero-sum game.

Jefferson’s legacy will be assessed and debated as long as there is an America to defend. Yet it would be awfully nice if the appointed custodians of the legacy of Thomas Jefferson would not hold those whose opinions were perfectly mainstream in the 1990s in such utter contempt as to level the charge of malice and malfeasance against those who continue to hold such assessments today. Such pretensions may serve as a sop to blind political ideologues searching for footing in the dark, but it is contemptuously narrow and ironically at odds with the Jeffersonian spirit of free inquiry wherever the truth may lead.

Like Jefferson, we accept the imperfections of the present day pathographers, knowing that much like their subject, the good they contribute outshines the many flaws. Yet for those of us who do defend the Jeffersonian legacy — and dare we still call ourselves Jeffersonian conservatives? — it would serve us all to be treated on our own terms.

The present approach by Onuf and Cogliano served no other purpose but to ruin a good book. Which to be consistent with the Great Men of History thesis, was a personal and moral choice — not a victim of an unfortunate historic circumstance.

Shaun Kenney is the senior editor for The Republican Standard. This column has been republished here with permission from The Republican Standard.