In this lucid study, Francis Cogliano provides a comprehensive review of Thomas Jefferson's lengthy career on the global stage. While many of Jefferson's initiatives, such as the Louisiana Purchase, have been exhaustively mined by scholars since Henry Adams, the grace and power of Cogliano's study is its breadth and application of cohesive mortar between what are often seen as disparate and desultory Jeffersonian gambits. Most importantly, Cogliano's work is faithful to the historical record in understanding Jefferson's statecraft on its own terms, rather than as a “prequel” to future American international conduct.

International relations has long stood as a conspicuous square peg in the round hole of Jefferson scholarship, and, despite Jefferson's centrality to early American foreign policy, comprehensive studies of his diplomacy are surprisingly few. There are many explanations for this lacuna in the literature, such as the current preference for social historical and ideological questions in early American scholarship as well as the complexity and breadth of Jefferson's forty-year political career which challenge easy synthesis. Perhaps chiefly, sorting through Jefferson's apparent inconsistencies on international questions is a task that few scholars relish: the author of the Declaration of Independence became largely dismissive of republican revolutions in New Spain, Haiti, and even France; the advocate of strict limits on executive power sent a naval squadron to the Mediterranean and purchased Louisiana on his own authority; and the fervent champion of freedom of expression fumed at any criticism of his Embargo policy. Fortunately, Cogliano, who in his earlier work Thomas Jefferson: Reputation and Legacy (Edinburgh University Press, 2006) wrestled with many of these Jeffersonian political contortions, comes to the task ideally prepared and rises to the occasion.

Jefferson scholars may detect a subtle pun in Cogliano's title which cleverly reveals the deeper purpose of his project. David C. Hendrickson and Robert W. Tucker's 1990 study of Jefferson's foreign policy, Empire of Liberty—which has stood for nearly a quarter century as the standard study of the subject—argued that Jefferson's approach to international relations was characterized by moralism, idealism, and a fervent belief that the United States should eschew traditional “reason of state.” Their “realist critique” of Jefferson traced the origins of, and laid the blame for, American idealism and exceptionalism in global affairs directly at Monticello's doorstep, and drew broad comparisons between Jefferson and his twentieth-century successors, most notably Woodrow Wilson. As such, their work became an indictment of patterns of American foreign policy supposedly championed by Jefferson rather than a contextual analysis of the Atlantic world with which he was forced to contend.

Cogliano wisely and emphatically rejects this interpretation in favor of a more nuanced thesis that “although Jefferson was guided by a clear ideological vision for the American republic, he was pragmatic about the means he employed to protect the republic and advance its strategic interests” (10). He argues that Jefferson's “end, republican liberty, was consistent, but the means he employed to achieve it varied according to circumstance” (142). Those means frequently included many of the time-honored traditions of ancien-régime statecraft, such as the use or threat of force, balance-of-power diplomacy, and extraordinarily elastic reading of treaties and frontiers, all of which Cogliano recounts in considerable detail through well-chosen case studies such as the Barbary War, the Nootka Sound crisis of 1790, the Louisiana Purchase, and the 1793 Neutrality debates. While his narrative accounts of these episodes largely accord with previous scholarship, Cogliano's aggressive use of primary sources and clarity of explanation add freshness even to familiar ground.

The book proceeds largely chronologically, beginning with Jefferson's term as governor of Virginia in 1779–81. Though often considered a disastrous period in Jefferson's political career, Cogliano perceptively understands Jefferson's governorship as a brutal political laboratory and that “the lessons he derived from this experience would inform his judgment as a diplomat and president” (34). Most critically, he notes, Jefferson absorbed the need for alacrity, compartmentalization, and centralized control of policymaking and execution—traits he would deploy effectively as president, particularly in the Barbary War and Louisiana negotiations. Through this episode Cogliano develops a secondary line of argument to his ends/means dichotomy: that Jefferson often acted as a true “emperor of liberty” whose conduct was at times not unlike that of contemporary European leaders he feared and admired: Napoleon and Alexander I of Russia, both of whom understood the high stakes of international politics where second chances were a luxury. While a committed republican, “the Jefferson who emerged from the War of Independence recognized that the survival of the republic must be the paramount concern of an executive. He was not overly constrained by constitutional scruples or by the means necessary to achieve this end” (41).

Through careful parsing of documents Cogliano demonstrates Jefferson to have been sophisticated in realpolitik—indeed, his careful waltz between belligerents France and Britain in 1793, predicated upon not having to make the overt choice between them that Hamilton suggested, anticipated Bismarck's posture toward Austria and Russia nearly a century later. Jefferson's use of time as a weapon—awaiting more favorable opportunities from contingencies that may arise from the fortunes of European wars—worked brilliantly in the 1790s, but the clock eventually got the better of him in the Embargo crisis of 1808, as Cogliano observes. As a diplomatic tactician, Cogliano repeatedly and accurately portrays Jefferson as an unequalled prodigy of playing a weak hand for all it was worth (203).

What is less clear in this otherwise gifted study is the precise nature of Jefferson's “republican” ends in foreign policy. Cogliano asserts that Jefferson's at times Machiavellian means were offered in the larger service of the interests of the United States, but what precisely did this mean to Jefferson, and when? He notes, for example, that Jefferson sought the United States to “remain a virtuous agrarian republic” (119) and rejected manufacturing and pre-industrialism in favor of agriculture (47–49). Yet by 1816 Jefferson talks of manufacturing as necessary to American independence. Similarly, Jefferson's relentless focus on western expansion could be construed as an end in itself, or a means to a larger sociopolitical end. As with many of Jefferson's theoretical utterances, determining his objectives becomes in Talleyrand's phrase a question of dates and context. Given the massive scholarship on Jefferson's political and legal thought across the span of his career and conceptual analyses of “republicanism” in both the historical and social science literature, it is surprising not to see as detailed a historiographical analysis of competing interpretations of Jefferson's “Americanism” and a more robust review of the literature. While Cogliano develops the means side of his equation brilliantly, the ends of Jefferson's policy—which he characterizes as a “clear, coherent, ideological vision” (7)—are often anything but as the book moves through time.

Nevertheless, Cogliano has written a definitive diplomatic history which by virtue of its scope and range offers an invaluable service to Jefferson scholarship on several levels and which, by avoiding overly broad inferences about modern American foreign policy, keeps the focus where it belongs—on the highly contingent, often violent, and incessantly competitive universe of Atlantic statecraft in the early American period, and Jefferson's unceasing attempts to manage it to his advantage.