Author Dumas Malone published this first volume of six on the life and times of Thomas Jefferson back in 1948. A lot has changed since then. However, his extensive research from what was available at the time provides a detailed profile of one of the Founding Fathers of the United States.

Jefferson the Virginian is just that; about Jefferson’s time living in and as a representative of the state of Virginia. He was born in Virginia, grew up there, and left behind his estate of Monticello for future generations. He was quite the liberal for his day and repeatedly advocated for the end of slavery despite owning slaves himself. Numerous times he proposed laws to reform slavery and was always defeated. As a lawyer, he took cases pro bono for slaves who tried to sue for their freedom.

This is probably the hardest part of who Jefferson is to come to terms with. Even here, she takes possession of slaves a little at a time until between all of the different properties he owned there were over 200 under his ownership. The book does little to go into the conditions those slaves lived in or what their lives were like. The Hemmings family is mentioned as coming into Jefferson’s possession after his marriage. Of course, now we know there was much more to the relationship between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemmings, but back in 1948 not much was brought up, at least in this volume.

For most of Jefferson the Virginian, he is married to Martha Skelton Wayles. He loved his wife very much and was devastated when she passed. Only two of the six children she bore while married to Jefferson survived past their infancy, with a son from her first marriage also dying at age 3 while Jefferson was courting her. Of all the letters in Jefferson’s records, the ones missing were between him and Martha, so not much is known about her other than what others had to say. Malone states that Jefferson felt his letters were important since he was a public figure, but he wanted to keep Martha all to himself and burned their letters after her death.

At William & Mary College in Williamsburg, Jefferson studied philosophy and came to be quite well-read. After college, he studied law and was admitted to the Virginia bar. He represented Albemarle County in the Virginia House of Burgesses at Williamsburg. All the while he was devouring books and became an authority on a number of subjects.

It is interesting to hear Jefferson’s philosophy on many subjects as he was quite the revolutionary for his time, believing in “natural law” and personal liberty. It’s easy to see where his motivation for the Declaration of Independence came from. The book also tells how Jefferson’s definitive book about Virginia, Notes on the State of Virginia, came to be which I found very interesting.

The audiobook for this volume is very good. Narrated by Anna Fields, she doesn’t do much trying to portray different characters, which I found to be good. This feels more like it deserves serious consideration rather than being acted out. The audiobook is over 16 hours long just to cover this period in Jefferson’s life.

If there’s one critique, it’s that Malone doesn’t seem to challenge Jefferson’s beliefs and how they conflicted at times. I feel like he is more reporting facts than offering opinions, which is fine. There doesn’t seem to be much negative, except possibly for Jefferson’s time as Governor of Virginia during the Revolutionary War. He definitely was not appreciated by his constituency or those who served in the legislature at the time. Just looking at this period showed me Malone was not looking at Jefferson’s life with rose-colored glasses, as others have accused him of doing.

Although Jefferson the Virginian is quite old, it contains a good deal of research based on the writing of Jefferson and others of that era that help gain a better understanding of what this time was like, not just for Jefferson, but for others who lived during this time. The next volume takes him to France just before the Revolution, and it will be intriguing to see what was written about the slaves who accompanied him before DNA could confirm that he fathered children with Sally Hemmings. The thoroughness of information presented here is fantastic, and I recommend it to anyone who wants a better grasp on the American Revolution and the early days of the United States, rather than relying on the white-washed history we were presented in school.