The Age of Jefferson: Online Course

The University of Virginia offers an online course titled ‘The Age of Jefferson’. As someone who has a very strong dislike of Jefferson, the course didn’t appeal to me at first, but I started it because I thought it would be mostly about the time period and not the man himself. This definitely did appeal to me; I’ve loved that period for several years now.

The sections of the course are: Jefferson as an American icon, The Declaration of Independence, Jefferson and Slavery, Jefferson and Religion, Jefferson and Education and ‘The earth belongs to the living’. I just wrote Jefferson way too many times.

That’s not really what the course is like, though. It is most definitely about Jefferson, but to be honest I didn’t hate that as much as I thought I would. Peter Onuf, the lecturer who has made the course, is a much more interesting speaker than those on some of the other online courses I’ve done recently, and he does try to give a balanced view in some sections. This includes pointing out Jefferson’s hypocrisy with regards to equality and slavery- Jefferson claimed to hate slavery, but had hundreds of slaves throughout his lifetime, was active in the slave trade in Virginia and did nothing to try and end slavery in the US.

However, Onuf does not criticise Jefferson for his hypocrisy in other areas. For example, Onuf jokes that ‘The people at the top are well, they’re closet aristocrats. Or in the case of Alexander Hamilton, it’s not even closet, he’s out of the closet.’ From a Jeffersonian scholar’s perspective, maybe this seems to be true, and I will admit that I am biased against Jefferson in favour of Hamilton. However, even to an impartial observer this must seem hypocritical- Hamilton was a penniless immigrant from the Caribbean who was so poor that he left behind many debts after his death to his wife because the salary for government officials was low at the time. Jefferson probably didn’t even notice that he had a salary from the government. The view of Hamilton as a monarchist is debatable; the fact that Jefferson ruled over hundreds of people is not.

Overall, I did enjoy the course. I learnt a lot about Jefferson as a person and the perspective of Virginians during the period. It’s also not as long as many other courses, so it’s a great one to do quickly.

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