Onuf opens this latest addition to his expanding Jeffersonian oeuvre with a commonplace remark: “Thomas Jefferson loved his ‘country,’ Virginia.” Scholars routinely link that observation to the underlying provincialism of eighteenth-century American life and, in Jefferson’s case, to his healthy attachment to states’-rights thinking and the belief that the Tenth Amendment stated a principle of federalism more robust than the mere “truism” of modern jurisprudence. Onuf problematizes this notion of state as country from the outset of this book (originally the William Lynwood Fleming Lectures in Southern History at Louisiana State University). Far from being a contribution to southern (or even Virginia) history, Onuf’s book offers a sustained account of Jefferson’s conception of American citizenship, elucidated through a set of comparisons and conversations between Jefferson and his three most celebrated Virginia contemporaries—Patrick Henry, James Madison, and George Washington.
Jefferson and the Virginians is another entry in the vast corpus of...