the Adams-Jefferson “friendship”

Book review:

Friends Divided: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson

by Gordon S. Wood (b. 1933)

New York: Penguin Press, 2017

502 pages, extensive index and notes

Gordon Wood is a rightly acclaimed historian and author. Friends Divided is not his best work.

Wood has enviably thorough knowledge of the history of the American revolution, and his oeuvre is fascinating and compelling.

It seems to me that Wood has invested too much of idealized historical circumstances into the thinking of Adams and Jefferson, and the torrent of writing that they produced.

They were influential human beings and leaders in their society. I don’t buy the so-called “great man” concept of historiography. I don’t think Wood endorses it, but it seems that he has pasted the towering personalities of Adams and Jefferson into and onto his remarkably comprehensive understanding of the Enlightenment, American revolutionary politics, and the social/commercial evolution of America before and after the divorce from Britain.

Adams and Jefferson had a celebrated (then and now) on-and-off friendship during most of their adult lives.

Friends Divided is not what the American Revolution is all about, despite Gordon Wood’s rapturous concatenation of the “friends” and the world they lived in.

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“…an era of corruption in High Places…”

Old Abe got it right….

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