Here is a brief excerpt from an article by Allen C. Guelzo that appeared in The New York Times. To read the complete article, check out others, and obtain subscription information, please click here.

Illustration Credit: Tamara Shopsin

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“Lincoln hated Thomas Jefferson.” That is not exactly what we expect to hear about the president who spoke of “malice toward none,” referring to the president who wrote that “all men are created equal.”

Presidents have never been immune from criticism by other presidents. But Jefferson and Lincoln? These two stare down at us from Mount Rushmore as heroic, stainless and serene, and any suggestion of disharmony seems somehow a criticism of America itself. Still, Lincoln seems not to have gotten that message.

“Mr. Lincoln hated Thomas Jefferson as a man,” wrote William Henry Herndon, Lincoln’s law partner of 14 years — and “as a politician.” Especially after Lincoln read Theodore F. Dwight’s sensational, slash-all biography of Jefferson in 1839, Herndon believed “Mr. Lincoln never liked Jefferson’s moral character after that reading.”

True enough, Thomas Jefferson had not been easy to love, even in his own time. No one denied that Jefferson was a brilliant writer, a wide reader and a cultured talker. But his contemporaries also found him “a man of sublimated and paradoxical imagination” and “one of the most artful, intriguing, industrious and double-faced politicians in all America.”

Lincoln, who was born less than a month before Jefferson left the presidency in 1809, had his own reasons for loathing Jefferson “as a man.” Lincoln was well aware of Jefferson’s “repulsive” liaison with his slave, Sally Hemings, while “continually puling about liberty, equality and the degrading curse of slavery.” But he was just as disenchanted with Jefferson’s economic policies.

[Guelzo’s narrative then takes an unexpected turn, before concluding thusly.]

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History is neither a political fable in which all the brothers are valiant and all the sisters virtuous, nor is it a tabloid exposé, full of crimes and follies, signifying nothing but victimization. There is, I admit, a caustic delight in unveiling the frailties of our Jeffersons (and our Lincolns). But the delight turns malevolent when it serves only to strip the American past of anything remarkable or exceptional, or when it demeans or discourages civic engagement and confidence.

Patriotism without criticism has no head; criticism without patriotism has no heart. Lincoln was capable of understanding both the greatness and the limits of Thomas Jefferson and the founders and still come out at the end embracing the American experiment for “giving liberty, not alone to the people of this country, but hope to the world for all future time.” And so should we.

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Here is a direct link to the complete article.

Allen C. Guelzo is a professor of the Civil War era at Gettysburg College and the author, most recently, of Gettysburg: The Last Invasion.