Thanks Rod for the heads-up on Wallace's Jefferson book. I was too quick to question Conor O'Brien's reading. Here are the reviews of this Oct. '99 study, right off amazon.com: From Kirkus Reviews Returning to his interest in the native tribes (The Long Bitter Trail: Andrew Jackson and the Indians, 1993, etc.), Bancroft Prizewinning historian Wallace gives us a book that immediately becomes the best among very few other studies of its subject. The author, an anthropologist deeply knowledgeable about American native cultures, reveals his colors early on: Jefferson's acts concerning the Indians were ``hypocritical, arbitrary, duplicitous, even harsh,'' the Squire of Monticello himself a liar and self-serving. While he studied the natives, knew some, and thought carefully about their lives and cultures, he could not rid himself of the conviction that these American tribal peoples must either become ``civilized''give up hunting and gathering, become farmers, and adopt Euro-American waysor disappear. But Jefferson didn't stop there: throughout his life, he effectually harried the Indians into war, land cessions, or flight and thus, in Wallace's view, must be held responsible both for inaugurating the failed 19th-century policy of removing the Indians to the far west and then onto reservations and for their drastic decline in numbers. This is a harsh indictment, made harsher still by Wallace's inappropriate likening of Jefferson's policies to genocide, a holocaust, and ethnic cleansing. After all, neither Jefferson nor most of his contemporaries sought the Indians' extermination. Yet, fortunately, these overwrought anachronistic charges do not affect much of the book, which otherwise makes clear the complexities of native-European interaction in the post-Revolutionary era. One result is that a reader comes away from the book's pages less critical of Jefferson than Wallace probably wishes, more accepting of the limits upon Jefferson's misguided views, and deflated by a sense of the near inevitability of the Indians' fate. One wishes that Wallace had occasionally lifted his eyes from the details of his subjectto compare, for example, the contributions of Indian removal and slavery to white man's democracy. A searching scholarly study of one of the great American dilemmas. (60 photos, 3 maps) -- Copyright 1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. Drew McCoy, Clark University Many have written ably on Thomas Jefferson and the Indians, but none has succeeded in bringing together as thoroughly and effectively as this book so many different, relevant dimensions of that topic. This is a rich, multidimensional book that offers a complex and utterly convincing interpretation of Jefferson and the first Americans. Anthony Wallace has succeeded in taking a fresh and engaging look at the subject. His approach and perspective are unique. Gary B. Nash, University of California, Los Angeles Wallace's study of the always enigmatic Jefferson will shock many but enlighten all. This masterful account of how the admirer and student of Indian languages and character was also the architect of removal policy and the grand rationalizer of cultural genocide is a must-read for all who teach American history. The master lesson of this absorbing book is how Jefferson's love of minimal government and maximal individual freedom, combined with his insatiable appetite for land, became the perfect formula for seizing Indian land and rationalizing the frontiersmen's ethnic cleansing. Sean Wilentz, Dayton-Stockton Professor of History, Princeton University Anthony F. C. Wallace, one of our premier historical anthropologists, has written a sober and troubling reassessment of Thomas Jefferson and the American Indian. Only a scholar as alive to paradox and tragedy as Wallace is could have written such a fine book on such a difficult subject. Book Description In Thomas Jefferson's time, white Americans were bedeviled by a moral dilemma unyielding to reason and sentiment: what to do about the presence of black slaves and free Indians. That Jefferson himself was caught between his own soaring rhetoric and private behavior toward blacks has long been known. But the tortured duality of his attitude toward Indians is only now being unearthed. In this landmark history, Anthony Wallace takes us on a tour of discovery to unexplored regions of Jefferson's mind. There, the bookish Enlightenment scholar-collector of Indian vocabularies, excavator of ancient burial mounds, chronicler of the eloquence of America's native peoples, and mourner of their tragic fate-sits uncomfortably close to Jefferson the imperialist and architect of Indian removal. Impelled by the necessity of expanding his agrarian republic, he became adept at putting a philosophical gloss on his policy of encroachment, threats of war, and forced land cessions-a policy that led, eventually, to cultural genocide. In this compelling narrative, we see how Jefferson's close relationships with frontier fighters and Indian agents, land speculators and intrepid explorers, European travelers, missionary scholars, and the chiefs of many Indian nations all complicated his views of the rights and claims of the first Americans. Lavishly illustrated with scenes and portraits from the period, Jefferson and the Indians adds a troubled dimension to one of the most enigmatic figures of American history, and to one of its most shameful legacies. From the Back Cover A good, thorough, fair, balanced, detailed, illuminating, clearly written, eminently sensible book. How to appraise Thomas Jefferson--especially how to reconcile his soul-stirring rhetoric with his less soul-stirring actions--is a subject of constant, if sometimes fevered, interest. The interpretive talents of Anthony F. C. Wallace give us every good reason to rejoice in the publication of this book. (Patricia Nelson Limerick, University of Colorado, Boulder) -------------------------------------- Jon Stephen Miller Managing Editor Walt Whitman Quarterly Review Department of English The University of Iowa Iowa City, Iowa 52242-1492 [log in to unmask] (319) 335-0592 ======================================