THE PORTABLE THOMAS JEFFERSON
Edited by MERRILL D. PETERSON 589 pages. Viking. $7.95.
The men who invented the country 200 years ago have long since been enshrouded by the myths of textbooks and the mists of hagiology. The most elusive figure in that gentlemen's club of revolutionaries was Thomas Jefferson. Henry Adams wrote that every other American statesman could be portrayed with "a few broad strokes of the brush," but Jefferson "only touch by touch with a fine pencil, and the perfection of the likeness depended upon shifting and uncertain flickers of semitransparent shadows."...