The Jefferson Paradox: Race, Slavery and the Promise of America

In her new book "Jefferson on Race," Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Annette Gordon-Reed invites readers to confront one of the most enduring contradictions in American history.

Among the nation’s founders, Thomas Jefferson was perhaps the most deeply and personally entangled with the issue of race and slavery. The author of the United States Declaration of Independence, who famously wrote that “all men are created equal,” enslaved more than 600 people over the course of his life while also condemning slavery in his writings. How can we understand this profound contradiction?

Drawing from Jefferson’s letters, public writings, plantation records, and accounts from those who lived at Monticello, including his son Madison Hemings, Gordon-Reed invites readers to examine Jefferson’s own words about African Americans, slavery, and Native Americans. The result is a revealing portrait of a founding figure grappling with the realities of a multiracial slave society while professing ideals of liberty and equality.

As the nation approaches the United States Semiquincentennial, this timely conversation offers an opportunity to reconsider Jefferson’s legacy and the enduring questions about race, freedom, and democracy that continue to shape the American story.

"Jefferson on Race" is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand Jefferson’s conflicted attitudes—and the impact of race and slavery on American history.

About the Editor:

Annette Gordon-Reed is a New York Times–bestselling historian and the Carl M. Loeb University Professor at Harvard University. Her books include "The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family," which won the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award, "Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy," and (with Peter S. Onuf) "Most Blessed of the Patriarchs: Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of the Imagination."