The ‘last Renaissance man’
Placing Thomas Jefferson in the intellectual life of his times may best be understood by quoting the third U.S. president himself on the character of the first, George Washington, according to an American historian: “His mind was great and powerful, without being of the very first order; his penetration strong, though not so acute as that of a Newton, Bacon, or Locke; and as far as he saw, no judgment was ever sounder.” “Thomas Jefferson has been called the last Renaissance man,” said Wilson J. Moses, the Ferree Professor of American History at Pennsylvania State University, as he kicked off “Mammoths, Meteors, and Mulattoes.” The Wednesday lecture was the second of three on “Thomas Jefferson and the Notion of Liberty,” part of the Nathan I. Huggins series sponsored by the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research. “It’s been said Jefferson was the last man to engage with success all...