美国的狮身人面像 (1996)

《美国的狮身人面像：托马斯·杰弗逊的性格》（英语：American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson）是曼荷莲学院教授约瑟夫·埃利斯创作的一部托马斯·杰弗逊的传记，1996年在克诺夫出版社出版发行，获得1997年度的美国国家图书奖非小说奖。

American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson, is a 1996 book written by Joseph Ellis, a professor of history at Mount Holyoke College. It won the 1997 National Book Award for Nonfiction.

Overview

Ellis' approach to explaining the character of Thomas Jefferson begins on June 20, 1775, with Jefferson's arrival in Philadelphia as the Colony of Virginia's delegate to the Continental Congress and the drafting of the Declaration of Independence. He follows through to the president's retirement at Monticello. Central to the book are Jefferson's contradictions and inconsistencies. Ellis covers Jefferson's career as ambassador to France, Secretary of State, planter and president.

He did not always speak exactly as he felt, either towards his friends or his enemies. As a consequence, he has left hanging over a part of his public life a vapor of duplicity..., the presence of which is generally felt more than it is seen.

Ellis showed how Jefferson shied away from public attention. According to Ellis, Jefferson gave just two public speeches as President of the United States. Thomas Jefferson felt far more comfortable writing, to which the Declaration of Independence attests, than public speaking. He worked extensively behind the scenes with other politicians to accomplish his political programs and create alliances.

Ellis praises Thomas Jefferson's first term as one of the most successful of any US presidency in terms of achieving stated goals; in his first term, Jefferson made the Louisiana Purchase, which would so affect the character of the United States, and significantly reduced the federal budget. But what sets Jefferson apart from other U.S. presidents, particularly John Adams, was his uniquely "feminine" approach to politics. Detesting direct confrontation, he was a master "dinner table" politician. He was known for inviting his competitors to dinner to plant the seeds of his ideas and defuse controversies.

Reception

Brent Staples in the New York Times Book Review commented, "Joseph J. Ellis's American Sphinx is a brief and elegant return to Monticello. Mr. Ellis...is a remarkably clear writer, mercifully free of both the groveling and the spirit of attack that have dominated the subject in the past....'American Sphinx' is fresh and uncluttered but rich in historical context." Like several of his other books, American Sphinx was a bestseller.

Relationship between Jefferson and Hemings

Ellis suggested in the text that evidence for an affair between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings was "inconclusive". Specifically, Ellis stated in the appendix to American Sphinx,

Unless the trustees of the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation decide to exhume the remains and do DNA testing on Jefferson as well as some of his alleged progeny, it leaves the matter a mystery about which advocates on either side can freely speculate...This means that for those who demand an answer the only recourse is plausible conjecture, prefaced as it must be with profuse statements about the flimsy and wholly circumstantial character of the evidence. In that spirit, which we might call the spirit of responsible speculation, after five years mulling over the huge cache of evidence that does exist on the thought and character of the historical Jefferson, I have concluded that the likelihood of a liaison with Sally Hemings is remote.

In 1997 Annette Gordon-Reed analyzed the historiography in her book Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy. She noted that historians had accepted Jefferson descendants' denials while overlooking significant evidence that supported the paternity thesis, such as Madison Hemings' memoir attesting to his parentage, the facts that the Hemings family was the only one that Jefferson freed, and that Hemings only conceived when Jefferson was at Monticello (based on documentation by the biographer Dumas Malone).