Never Forget: They Kept Lots of Slaves

The eminent historian Gordon S. Wood reviews:

INVENTING A NATION
Washington, Adams, Jefferson.
By Gore Vidal.
198 pp. New Haven: Yale University Press. $22.

AN IMPERFECT GOD
George Washington, His Slaves, and the Creation of America.
By Henry Wiencek.
Illustrated. 404 pp. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $26.

‘NEGRO PRESIDENT’
Jefferson and the Slave Power.
By Garry Wills.
274 pp. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. $25.

JEFFERSON’S DEMONS
Portrait of a Restless Mind.
By Michael Knox Beran.
Illustrated. 265 pp. New York: Free Press. $25.

THOMAS JEFFERSON
By R. B. Bernstein.
Illustrated. 253 pp. New York: Oxford University Press. $26.

The esteemed senior historian Edmund S. Morgan reviews the historical works of Gore Vidal, including Inventing a Nation, in The New York Review of Books: A Tract for the Times.