Thomas Jefferson Survives

On the 250th anniversary of his greatest achievement, two leading historians take on the question, “Does Thomas Jefferson still matter?” Fifty years after signing the Declaration of Independence, John Adams reassured the nation from his deathbed, “Thomas Jefferson survives.” Unaware that Jefferson had died mere hours earlier, Adams was in a larger sense correct: Jefferson had been immortalized in the American imagination. Today, Jefferson has effectively become a partisan talisman—jettisoned by the left for his moral failings, embraced and repurposed by the right as an avatar of white nationalism. Dissatisfied with the reductive clichés that now define Jefferson’s legacy, Peter S. Onuf and Francis D. Cogliano restore the founding father to his historical context, elucidating in three essays how Jefferson’s understanding of history shaped his responses to the crises of his time, how he conceived of the physical entity that became the United States, and how he articulated a new national identity in 1776. Through their search for understanding, Onuf and Cogliano demonstrate not only why Jefferson matters, but how his wisdom can be applied today.