American Age:
Book Review
by Mike Mahn

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IPS Features Staff

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Title: Jefferson, a Novel

  Author: Max Byrd

NIAGARA Ulverscroft Group Limited

Max Byrd’s beguiling historical novel begins with this premise:

“It is 1784 and Jefferson, the newly appointed American ambassador to the court of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette, has just arrived in Paris – a city adrift in intrigue, upheaval, and temptation that will challenge his principles, incite his passions, and change Thomas Jefferson forever… Through the eyes of his impressionable young secretary, William Short, we watch as the future president builds his dream of an America with fellow patriots John Adams and Ben Franklin, and as he struggles between political ambition and an unexpected crisis of the heart with a woman who has the power to destroy him.”

The author comes at Jefferson sideways, using a contemporary point of view rather than the aloof and distant perspective of the scholarly historian. Byrd’s work is factually grounded in important respects, though he uses literary license to peer from viewpoints that could only be considered speculative. The Jefferson book is the first of three in a series Byrd crafted, using family connections to pivot into succeeding generations, connecting with Andrew Jackson and Ulysses Grant. (These latter books will be reviewed later). In this reader’s estimation, the first is the best. The literary contrivance (using Jefferson’s personal secretary as the narrator) works well.

Jefferson is too complex a subject to be looked upon in the traditional linear manner, or by comparing his biography to others of the era. History has smiled upon him for a variety of reasons, many well deserved. He has his famed placed on the Mall in Washington, D.C., styled after his beloved home place, Monticello. We know the Jefferson litany by heart, beginning with his co-authorship of the Declaration of Independence, and ending, officially, upon the completion of his two terms as President 33 years later, in 1809. But there is so much more that we don’t know and may never learn.

Byrd probes the edges, but doesn’t touch questions I’d like to ask TJ:

Why did you allow your ambition to scuttle your relation with George Washington? Was it petty jealousy and passive aggression, reflecting your own feelings of insecurity in the shadow of this genuine war hero and true father of this nation? 

Why did you not even acknowledge Washington’s death on that dark December day in 1799, or comment on it until so much later? Even then, were you merely polishing your resume for the archivists?

Why could you not wait your turn, which surely would have followed, but instead felt compelled to oust John Adams after his first term as President? Yes, I know you died as friends, famously on the same day (the 50^th anniversary of the Declaration), but how could you have stabbed him in the back, politically, at the height of his career?”

These are far more interesting questions than the race-as-usual angle stirred by the white liberal guilt industry concerning alleged sexual relations with the slave Sally Hemings, and the alleged siring of her children. [As a footnote, see the Wall Street Journal article of July 3, 2001, by Robert F. Turner, who chaired the Jefferson-Hemings Scholars Commission that substantially debunked the claim of the Hemings’ descendants. I clipped the WSJ feature and enclosed it within the cover of Mr. Byrd’s book.]

Jefferson deserves his monument, most notably in my estimation, for his brilliant and visionary conceiving of the expedition of discovery undertaken by Lewis & Clark. Maybe we know too much and see too clearly the feet of clay of these founders, such as Jefferson. Maybe we don’t know enough. Max Byrd may agree, which may explain his interesting angle on this much studied subject. I strongly recommend the book.