“Jefferson personified [the] revolutionary transformation... Yet Jefferson himself was the most unlikely of popular radicals. He was a well-connected and highly cultivated Southern landowner who never had to scramble for his position in Virginia. The wealth and leisure that made possible his great contributions to liberty and democracy were supported by the labor of hundreds of slaves. He was tall -- six feet two or three -- and gangling, with a reddish freckled complexion, bright hazel eyes, and copper-colored hair, which he tended to wear unpowdered in a queue. Unlike his fellow Revolutionary John Adams, whom he both fought and befriended for fifty years, he was reserved, self-possessed, and incurably optimistic, sometimes to the point of quixoticism. Although the could be shrewd and practical, his sense of the future was sometimes skewed. As late as 1806, for example, he believed that Norfolk, Virginia, would soon surpass New York as a great commercial city and would probably in time become ‘the greatest sea-port in the United States, New Orleans perhaps excepted.’ He disliked personal controversy and was always charming in face-to-face relations with both friends and enemies. But at a distance he could hate, and thus many of his opponents concluded that he was two-faced and duplicitous.
He was undoubtedly complicated. He mingled in the loftiest visions with astute backroom politicking. He spared himself nothing and was a compulsive shopper, yet he extolled the simple yeoman farmer who was free from the lures of the marketplace. He hated the obsessive money-making the proliferating banks, and the liberal capitalistic world that emerged in the Northern states in the early nineteenth century, but no one in America did more to bring that world about. Although he kept the most tidy and meticulous accounts of his daily transactions, he never added up his profits and losses. He thought public debts were the curse of a healthy state, yet his private debts kept mounting as he borrowed and borrowed again to meet his rising expenditures. He was a sophisticated man of the world who loved no place better than his remote mountaintop home in Virginia. This slaveholding aristocrat ended up becoming the most important apostle for liberty and democracy in American history.”
From, Gordon S. Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815. Oxford University Press, 2009, pp. 277-278.
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