Thomas Jefferson believed that the American revolution was a                  transformative moment in the history of political civilization. He hoped that his                  own efforts as a founding statesman and theorist would help construct a progressive                  and enlightened order for the new American nation that would be a model and                  inspiration for the world. Peter S. Onuf's new book traces Jefferson's vision of the                  American future to its roots in his idealized notions of nationhood and empire.                  Onuf's unsettling recognition that Jefferson's famed egalitarianism was elaborated                  in an imperial context yields strikingly original interpretations of our national                  identity and our ideas of race, of westward expansion and the Civil War, and of                  American global dominance in the twentieth                  century.Jefferson's vision of an American ''empire                  for liberty'' was modeled on a British prototype. But as a consensual union of                  self-governing republics without a metropolis, Jefferson's American empire would be                  free of exploitation by a corrupt imperial ruling class. It would avoid the cycle of                  war and destruction that had characterized the European balance of                  power.The Civil War cast in high relief the                  tragic limitations of Jefferson's political vision. After the Union victory, as the                  reconstructed nation-state developed into a world power, dreams of the United States                  as an ever-expanding empire of peacefully coexisting states quickly faded from                  memory. Yet even as the antebellum federal union disintegrated, a Jeffersonian                  nationalism, proudly conscious of America's historic revolution against imperial                  domination, grew up in its place.In Onuf's view,                  Jefferson's quest to define a new American identity also shaped his ambivalent                  conceptions of slavery and Native American rights. His revolutionary fervor led him                  to see Indians as ''merciless savages'' who ravaged the frontiers at the British                  king's direction, but when those frontiers were pacified, a more benevolent                  Jefferson encouraged these same Indians to embrace republican values. African                  American slaves, by contrast, constituted an unassimilable captive nation, unjustly                  wrenched from its African homeland. His great panacea:                  colonization.Jefferson's ideas about race reveal                  the limitations of his conception of American nationhood. Yet, as Onuf strikingly                  documents, Jefferson's vision of a republican empire--a regime of peace, prosperity,                  and union without coercion--continues to define and expand the boundaries of                  American national identity.

Jefferson's Empire: The Language of American Nationhood PDF

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