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Thomas Jefferson and the Rhetoric of Virtue. By James L. Golden and Alan L. Golden. (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc., 2002. Pp. xvii, 522. Appendix. Cloth, $40.00.)Thomas Jefferson: A Chronology of His Thoughts. Edited by Jerry Holmes. (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc., 2002. Pp. vii, 333. Chronology, appendix. Cloth, $35.00.)Although these two books provide different approaches to Thomas Jefferson's life (the first is a monograph and the second is an editing of his letters with commentary), they have numerous similarities. Neither principal author James L. Golden nor Jerry Holmes are academic historians (Alan L. Golden, who died shortly after the manuscript went to press, taught history at Lock Haven University), but each has devoted considerable effort to understanding Jefferson's public and private life (the Goldens' book was ten years in the making; Holmes's, twenty). Both works also reach favorable conclusions, on the whole, regarding Jefferson's contributions to his nation while admitting that he was enigmatic-if not contradictory-in many areas of his life.James L. Golden is emeritus professor of rhetoric and political communication at Ohio State University, and Thomas Jefferson and the Rhetoric of Virtue, written with his son, begins with the premise that "a careful and systematic study of [Jefferson's] rhetorical philosophy and practice" (x) contributes to our understanding of Jefferson's public and private life. Therefore, the book roots Jefferson's written discourse (throughout the book, the authors use "rhetoric" and "discourse" interchangeably) in topics related to virtue, defined as the promotion of the public good by placing the interests of society above personal ambition. "A quest for virtue," the authors write in the Preface, "was the guiding principle of his life, and the crucial duty of discourse, he believed, was to move individuals and society as a whole upward on the scale of good" (xi).Part one of the book searches Jefferson's writings for the sources that he used to construct his philosophy of rhetoric. Although the authors argue that Jefferson read widely in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century sources (most notably English and Scottish Enlightenment thinkers), they also demonstrate that he used Greek and Roman classics (especially Cicero) in constructing his rhetorical principles-a fact, they believe, that historians have not fully appreciated. Chapters in this section also probe Jefferson's principles of organizing his thoughts and his use of language and mode of delivery in his private correspondence, in his political communications, and in his philosophical, religious, and historical musings. The authors conclude that Jefferson consistently espoused in his writings the belief that on moral issues, private and public perspectives were intertwined. (Throughout the book, the authors use the words "moral," "ethical," and "virtuous" interchangeably.)Part two investigates Jefferson's practice of rhetoric, asking whether he measured up to the standards that he established for himself in his writings. The authors conclude from this inquiry that in his letter writing, as a spokesperson for the American Revolution, in his public addresses, and in his legal briefs, Jefferson successfully squared his rhetorical philosophy with his actions. "[I]n most instances," the authors determine, "Jefferson, in his verbal communication performances, succeeded ably in putting his rhetorical principles into practice" (464). They locate other times, however, where he set aside his principles of rhetorical reasoning and deviated from his philosophical standards. For example, he disparaged Plato and Socrates for antirepublican sentiments, refused to believe that Ossian's poems were authentic, and criticized David Hume's History of England but failed to adhere to his own canons in elevating John Baxter's A New and Impartial History of England above Hume's (chap. …

HOMAS Jefferson's letter to the Danbury Baptist Association of Connecticut, January I, 1802, contains a phrase that has become almost a household expression in the present-day United States: "a wall of separation between church and state." In his letter to the Danbury Baptists, Jefferson linked this phrase to the religion clause of the First Amendment: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." By juxtaposing the wall of separation metaphor and the Establishment Clause, Jefferson seemed to indicate that the First Amendment was intended to do more than merely prevent the federal government from favoring one religious denomination over another; rather, he seemed to suggest that its purpose was to cordon off government from religion and to block any meaningful interaction between the two. So, at least, the Supreme Court surmised in the i940s, using the authority of Jefferson's metaphor to rule in certain memorable cases that a "high and impregnable" "wall" must be erected between religion and government, strictly separating the two.1 Although later justices attacked the rulings of "the great age of the forties" and the Court itself has modified them somewhat, they continue to undergird church-state jurisprudence in the United States and are aggressively supported by many Americans.2 Other Americans, however, have argued that the Court erred in employing Jefferson's wall metaphor to explain the Establishment Clause, asking how a dictum delivered thirteen years after the composition of the First Amendment by a person who was in France at the time it was written can provide an authoritative interpretation of the language at issue. These critics believe that, far from erecting a barrier between government and religion, the First Amendment permits the government to patronize religion (in ways

I N the first Supreme Court case that dealt with the clause of the First Amendment that declares that Congress shall pass "no law respecting an establishment of religion," the justices recognized the central importance of the framers' views in defining the proper relationship between church and state. Those views merge from several sources-Thomas Jefferson's I786 Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom, James Madison's Memorial and Remonstrance, and Jefferson's letter in i802 to the Danbury Baptists.1 This letter first suggested the euphonious and oftenquoted phrase "a wall of separation" as a guide to the constitutional proximity of government and religion. In the half-century since that first decision, the Supreme Court has steadily refined and adapted the initial concepts and principles, creating different formulations of a constitutional test of nonestablishment. In the early years, long before the issue had reached the courts, the Establishment Clause could have been construed to mean no more than that the several surviving state-established churches were free of federal interference-giving some meaning to the curious language "no law respecting an Establishment of Religion." After the last state church was disestablished in the I830s, such an interpretation was no longer viable, if, indeed, it had ever been more than a theoretical possibility.

On April 27, 1795, Thomas Jefferson wrote an important letter to his chief political confidant and Virginia colleague, James Madison. In this letter Jefferson discussed the forthcoming presidential election and renewed his wish that Madison would become president "because there is not another person in the U.S. who being placed at the helm of our affairs, my mind would be so completely at rest for the fortune of our political bark." The greater part of the letter, however, is a recitation of the reasons why Jefferson himself would refuse to be a candidate. He told Madison that he felt the same way that he had felt when he had retired from Washington's cabinet two years earlier. He continued to enjoy the "delights . .. in the society of my family," he wrote, "and the agricultural pursuits in which I am so eagerly engaged." Jefferson concluded that he would not be a contestant for the presidency and that the "question is forever closed with me; my sole object is to avail myself of the first opening ever given me from a friendly quarter (and I could not with decency do it before), of preventing any division or loss of votes, which might be fatal to the interest."' The question is: what word should go in the blank space? The letterpress duplicate copy of the letter in the Jefferson Papers had a word crossed or blotted out and "Republican" written in above the line, thus reading "which might be fatal to the Republican in

This volume in the Second Series of The Papers of Thomas Jefferson contains the two important parliamentary documents he prepared during his lifelong study of the subject. Jefferson compiled the first document, called the Parliamentary Pocket-Book," while he was president of the Senate by virtue of his position as Vice- President of the United States. This informal guide was the basis for the Manual of Parliamentary Practice, which Jefferson completed in its earliest form by 1800 and which he had published in 1801. The Manual was the new nation's first full parliamentary rule book and is American democracy's reliable guide to its English parliamentary tradition. Still cited on the floors of Congress. Originally published in 1988. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

IT was "the received opinion in Virginia which very much attributed the promoting" of Bacon's Rebellion "to Mr. Laurence, and Mr. Bacon with his other adherents were esteemed as but wheels agitated by the weight of his former and present resentments," wrote Thomas Mathew. As for Bacon, "he was too young, too much a stranger there, and of a disposition too precipitate to manage things to that length those were carried, had not thoughtful Mr. Laurence been at the bottom." Who was Thomas Mathew, and to what extent should we credit his account of Bacon's Rebellion? On reading the Mathew manuscript, Thomas Jefferson wrote: "It appears to have been written by a person intimately acquainted with its origin, progress, and conclusion, 30 years after it took place, when the passions of the day had subsided, and reason might take a cool and deliberate review of the transaction. It was written too not for the public eye, but to satisfy the desire of a Minister, Lord Oxford; and the candor and the simplicity of the narrative cannot fail to command belief." We know today that Mathew was a Burgess in the Assembly of June i676, and that he was an eyewitness of many of the events he describes. Mathew tells us that Richard Lawrence had been "of Oxford University, and for wit, learning and sobriety was equall'd there by few," that he was "a thinking man, and . . . nicely honest, affable, and without blemish in his conversation." But against Sir William Berkeley, the Governor, Lawrence bore a bitter grudge for an unjust court decision which deprived him of a considerable estate in favor of a "corrupt favorite." "The old treacherous villain," Lawrence called him. Berkeley had reason to repent of having incurred Lawrence's hatred. Lawrence had married a wealthy widow who kept a "large house of public entertainment" at Jamestown, one of those ordinaries charging extraordinary prices of which visitors to the little capital complained. To her house came "those of the best quality," when a session of the court, a