Presented with an unexpected opening, he figured out how to take full advantage.” Young Jefferson finds a wild turkey already caught in a trap-“he tied it with his garter to a tree, shot it, and carried it home in triumph.” Not exactly the infant Hercules strangling the serpents, but it will do as a test that “foreshadowed much in Jefferson’s life” and illuminates his character: “When stymied, he learned to press forward.

“The assignment-the expectation-was that he was to come home with evidence that he could survive on his own in the wild.” The little deerstalker doesn’t do well, but “he soldiered on until his luck finally changed.” And here the episode slides into farce. Perhaps having George Washington’s formative, rough-and-tumble early years in mind, Meacham seeks to give Jefferson some backwoods cred and tells a story of a hunt that was set down by Jefferson’s grandson: “Jefferson learned the importance of endurance and improvisation early, and he learned it the way his father wanted him to: through action, not theory.” To toughen ten-year-old Tom, his father sent him into the woods, “alone, with a gun,” Meacham writes. Meacham has read the scholarly literature on Jefferson-some of it critical-but doesn’t let enough of this debate intrude on the storytelling, which nearly always puts Jefferson in the best possible light.Įarly in the book, Meacham shows that he has fallen under the Jeffersonian spell. There is some meat in the book, but finding it requires dexterity and doggedness-checking the endnotes after every ten pages or so to see what is missing from the passing panorama.

But Meacham has chosen storytelling over analysis, offering up a genial but meandering narrative. Since Jefferson is generally perceived more as a philosopher-king than a Tammany pol, such an examination, coming from a highly regarded biographer and political commentator, should yield fresh insights into the Sphinx.

THE SUBTITLE OF Jon Meacham’s massive new life of Thomas Jefferson promises a probing exploration of how-he-did-it-the ways and means of power politics.

Thomas jefferson meacham