Summary of Joseph J. Ellis's American Sphinx

By IRB Media

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Book Preview:

#1 Jefferson was a tall and slim young Virginian who was constantly singing. His hair and his singing were his two most distinctive characteristics. He sang whenever he was walking or riding, and sometimes when he was reading.

#2 Jefferson was a extremely serious young man, and he brought this attitude to the study of law. He was also extremely well prepared, and gained a reputation in the Williamsburg court as an extremely well-prepared barrister.

#3 Jefferson’s political career was not very successful. He opposed all forms of parliamentary taxation, and supported nonimportation resolutions against British trade regulations. He seemed to most of his political contemporaries a hovering and ever-silent presence.

#4 Jefferson was not elected to the original Virginia delegation in Philadelphia in 1774. He was chosen as a potential substitute for Edmund Randolph in anticipation of Randolph's decision to abandon his post at the conference.

• Language: English
• Publisher: IRB Media
• Release date: May 21, 2022
• ISBN: 9798822500686

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Insights on Joseph J. Ellis's American Sphinx

Contents

Insights from Chapter 1

Insights from Chapter 2

Insights from Chapter 3

Insights from Chapter 4

Insights from Chapter 5

Insights from Chapter 1

#1

Jefferson was a tall and slim young Virginian who was constantly singing. His hair and his singing were his two most distinctive characteristics. He sang whenever he was walking or riding, and sometimes when he was reading.

#2

Jefferson was a extremely serious young man, and he brought this attitude to the study of law. He was also extremely well prepared, and gained a reputation in the Williamsburg court as an extremely well-prepared barrister.

#3

Jefferson’s political career was not very successful. He opposed all forms of parliamentary taxation, and supported nonimportation resolutions against British trade regulations. He seemed to most of his political contemporaries a hovering and ever-silent presence.

#4

Jefferson was not elected to the original Virginia delegation in Philadelphia in 1774. He was chosen as a potential substitute for Edmund Randolph in anticipation of Randolph's decision to abandon his post at the conference.

#5

The audience at which Jefferson had aimed his instructions was the Virginia legislature, but they chose not to follow them. He had drafted a set of instructions for the first Virginia delegation to the Continental Congress, and they became the basis of his political reputation outside Virginia.

#6

Jefferson’s Summary View of the colonial relationship with Britain was a preliminary draft of the Declaration of Independence, written two years before the more famous document. It laid out all of the king’s crimes against colonial rights, and he was accused of negligence, illegality, and complicity in the African slave trade.

#7

The second latent feature in Summary View is an elaborate and largely mythological version of English history. The appeal of the Whig histories stems from their romantic endorsement of a pristine past, a long-lost time and place where men lived together in perfect harmony without coercive laws or predatory rulers.

#8

The theory of expatriation was completely false, but it was appealing because it suggested that independence from England was not a future prospect but an event that had already happened in the past.

#9

The Jeffersonian impulse to invent and then embrace such seductive fictions was not a deliberate effort at propaganda. But the Saxon myth and the doctrine of expatriation were complete fabrications. They were not clever and willful distortions, but complete illusions.

#10

Jefferson had a very private nature, and he tended to withdraw from the world. He was extremely self-conscious, and when he failed at something, he would bury it deeper inside himself and consider the world’s problems rather than his own.

#11

Jefferson’s attachment to the myth of the Saxon past was an early ideological manifestation of a characteristically Jeffersonian cast of mind. It represented his discovery of an idyllic time and place that accorded with his strong sense of the way things are meant to be.

#12

The Continental Congress was an arena for orators. John Adams, who has left the fullest personal account of the debates and deliberations, noted that Edward Rutledge of South Carolina was sprightly but not deep and had the