Essay Database

President Thomas Jefferson has recently been described as “the American Sphinx” by author Dr. Joseph Ellis in his book entitled American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson. A sphinx is defined as an enigmatic or puzzling person. The statement that Jefferson was “the American Sphinx” is largely true when it comes to Jefferson’s hypocritical position on the American policy of slavery. Foremost, Jefferson was a slave-owner who wrote the Declaration of Independence. In it …

…ending slavery included a fear that emancipation would lead to racial mixing.” His affair now personalizes this now hypocritical issue. In conclusion, Jefferson remains a confusing enigma to all who study him. There is little to disguise the fact that his professed values, personal as well as political, rarely measured up to his actual practices. Jefferson has suffered, then as now, from a plague of hypocrisy with regard to his conflicts between values and practices.