Society for Historians of the Early American Republic

The Unfinished Revolution: Education and Politics in the Thought of Thomas Jefferson byHarold Hellenbrand; Thomas JeffersonReview by: Robert M. SenkewiczJournal of the Early Republic, Vol. 11, No. 4 (Winter, 1991), pp. 568-570Published by: University of Pennsylvania Press on behalf of the Society for Historians of the EarlyAmerican RepublicStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3123370 .

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568 JOURNAL OF THE EARLY REPUBLIC

wrote anonymously. As a representative from Orange County, Madison authored for the Virginia General Assembly session of 1799- 1800, The Report of 1800, "a lengthy defense of his resolutions of the previous year [that] has subsequently become a critically important document for the expounding of the First Amendment" (xx-xxi).

In the election of 1800, Madison served as a presidential elector, and worked hard for a Jefferson victory. Numerous letters to Madison from such correspondents as Charles Pinckney, John Francis Mercer, Aaron Burr, David Gelston, and John Dawson, in addition to letters to and from Jefferson, confirm the special role played by Madison as confidant to Jefferson. Not unnaturally, Jefferson's election as president led to the naming of Madison as secretary of state in the new administration. Jefferson's inauguration on March 4, 1801, "thus reunited the two friends in the service of the federal government and paved the way for their common effort to redirect the course of the United States in the early years of the nineteenth century" (xxi).

Although this volume was originally scheduled to be published in

January 1991, it was delayed so that thirty-seven previously unpublished letters of Virginian Edmund Pendleton, whose thoughts influenced Madison, might be included. These letters were written between March 25, 1782 and January 30, 1795, and were-almost miraculously-discovered in a private documentary sale. They are thus contained in the supplement at the back of the book.

As with previous volumes, the notes in this one are detailed and useful, as is the index. This is an important addition to the series, and will greatly assist scholars of Madison and of these years of the early national period. As one reviewer whose own work has focused to date on the years since 1801, I am awaiting anxiously the publication of volume 18, which will, no doubt, reflect the same high editorial standards that are evident in the preceding volumes.

El Camino College Thom M. Armstrong

The Unfinished Revolution: Education and Politics in the Thought of Thomas Jefferson. By Harold Hellenbrand. (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1990. Pp. 207. $32.50.)

Thomas Jefferson's self-composed epitaph, in which he asked to be remembered as "Father of the University of Virginia," symbolized his deep concern with education. That Jefferson regarded public

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BOOK REVIEWS 569

education as an essential means of preserving the republic has been

recognized by biographers as diverse as Dumas Malone, Fawn Brodie, and Noble E. Cunningham, Jr. Historians of education have also analyzed Jefferson's theories. The basic work remains Roy Honeywell's The Educational Work of Thomas Jefferson (1931), but other

important contributions have been make by scholars such as Merle Curti, Frederick Rudolph, and Lawrence Cremin. On the face of it, it would seem that the historiographical ground of Thomas Jefferson and education has been well plowed.

But Harold Hellenbrand's The Unfinished Revolution offers some fresh perspectives on this important topic. Not simply another work on Jefferson's educational philosophy, this book is a study of what the author terms "the public dimension of Jefferson's educational ideas"

(16). Hellenbrand approaches this subject by setting it within the context of the late eighteenth-century revolt against patriarchy studied recently by Jay Fliegelman, and of the notions of affective individualism and affective authority identified by Lawrence Stone and Melvin Yazawa.

Hellenbrand argues that Jefferson's own education by a series of mentors like James Maury and George Wythe set the tone for his own thought. Later, after the premature death of his wife Martha, Jefferson worked to surround himself with younger men, such as James Madison, James Monroe, and William Short, and to form with them an educational community marked above all by rational conversation. This pedagogical grouping of mentors and affectionate friends became for Jefferson the picture of a well-ordered state. This

image stayed with him his entire life, and it formed the lens through which he viewed the public issues that engaged him.

In this context, Hellenbrand engages in a close reading of the classic Jefferson texts and offers interesting interpretations of

Jefferson as revolutionist, reviser, president, Indian negotiator, and university founder. Hellenbrand argues, for instance, that in A

Summary View of the Rights of British America (1774), Jefferson regarded the empire as a voluntary agreement inspired by mutual affections and Great Britain as a lapsed affectionate friend and parent. And he interprets the close physical proximity between faculty and students envisioned in Jefferson's design for the University of Virginia as the founder's attempt to recreate the affectionate contact between mentor and tutee that he had experienced in Williamsburg in the 1760s.

Not all readers will be convinced that Hellenbrand's framework works equally well in all of the areas of Jefferson's life to which it is applied in this book. The work as a whole, however, makes a strong

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570 JOURNAL OF THE EARLY REPUBLIC

case that Jefferson's ideas on education and his identification of the state with an idealized affectionate family were close to the core of his

thought.

Santa Clara University Robert M. Senkewicz

The Journals of the Lewis & Clark Expedition, Vol. 6: November 2, 1805 - March 22, 1806. Edited by Gary E. Moulton and Thomas W.

Dunlay. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990. Pp. xii, 531.

Figures. $50.00.)

In their long-anticipated sixth volume of the writings of the Lewis and Clark expedition, editors Gary E. Moulton and Thomas W. Dunlay successfully capture the expedition's arrival and winter sojourn on the Pacific coast. Culminating its mission to explore westward via the Missouri and Columbia rivers, the Corps of Discovery arrived November 15, 1805. Sodden by the coastal rain they would come to know so well, the explorers set out to establish winter quarters, consolidate their accumulated knowledge, and prepare for the return

trip to St. Louis. The establishment of Fort Clatsop in December

provided shelter and a base for subsistence activities by the enlisted men. The small fort, named for the local Indians, was also the stage for the diplomatic and intellectual pursuits of captains Meriwether Lewis and William Clark.

And such pursuits they were. The fort provided the best

opportunity to organize their field notes and maps since their stay at Fort Mandan the previous winter. Here Clark compiled a map of the entire journey from St. Louis, based on his navigation supplemented by Native American contributions enroute. While both men observed local flora and fauna, and sketched more illustrations than at any other time, Lewis was compulsively meticulous in his descriptions. Here appears the first description, among many others, of Oregon grape and salal, Sitka spruce and grand fir, the sage grouse and

Oregon bobcat. Here, too is among the most earnest attempts of the captains to

comprehend Native American society. After noting on January 30, 1806 that "nothing transpired today worthy of notice," Lewis went on to describe in detail Clatsop headware "of the bark of cedar and

beargrass wrought with the fingers so closely that it casts the rain most effectually . . ." (249). Lewis did so evocatively that explorers traded for such hats for their own use. Lewis's first-person

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