Unstable in All His Ways: A New Life of Thomas Jefferson

Reviewing Thomas S. Kidd’s Biography of America’s Double-Minded Third President

Thomas Jefferson represents the most emblematic of America’s Founders. Also the most enigmatic, and it’s the enigma that informs the emblem.

A man of multiple contradictions, Jefferson was like the nation whose freedom he signaled in his greatest contribution to human letters—the Declaration of Independence. Committed to belief in God, Jefferson held to …