Up until 1851, virtually all biographical accounts for Jefferson relied on general and common knowledge gained from official records and public writings and newspapers.

Thomas Jefferson (April 13, 1743 – July 4, 1826) was an American Founding Father, the principal author of the Declaration of Independence (1776) and the third president of the United States (1801–1809).

Becker's interpretations of Jeffersonian "liberalism" in drafts of The Declaration of Independence (1776) evinced a change from Becker's Progressive Era social liberalism to questioning, particularly after the First Red Scare, the relevance of any natural rights philosophy to early twentieth-century modernities and imperialism, all in the context of fledgling formulations of Jeffersonian democracy.

Whether Bailyn anachronistically construed the shift in Becker's interpretations as nascent (more than the dreaded "proto-") Cold War liberalism requires further scholarly inquiry.

Jefferson, in his "liberal conventionality" vis-à-vis the "function of bills of rights," believed that "the real threats to liberty in a republican government come not from the power of the state as such but from 'overbearing majorities.'

"It was this liberal conventionality," Bailyn decided, that "engrossed his attention" on French Revolutionary aims to "remodel the institutions of government to conform to enlightenment principles.

All else---the latent, irrational elements involved in a social upheaval: the powerful resistance of entrenched privilege, the capricious violence of enflamed mobs, the irresponsibility of demagogues---took him by surprise...Jefferson may have been convinced by his own argument that 'vices in the form of government' lay at the heart of Europe's miseries, but others---more consistent empiricists, more original, dissatisfied, quizzical minds---were not.

As a result, "Madison, next to whose comments on constitutional principle and theory Jefferson's remarks were rigid and obvious, found his opinion of men and measures penetrating and reliable.

The dual characteristics failed to consistently occupy separate spheres in Thomas Jefferson's writings---often, according to Bailyn, they were a dyadic pair rather than solely correlative.

Before Jefferson embarked for Europe in 1784, Bailyn argued, the "means" of the American Revolution had been "necessarily subordinated to the end of survival, and the most effective ideas were the most ideological, the most universally evocative of idealism and self-sacrifice.

Jefferson, for instance, began to study more conceptual underpinnings of the federal Constitution than his initial "dilemma," especially as "he came to grips with the concrete problems, learned more of the political battles that had taken place in the convention, and became caught up, even at such a distance, in the campaign for ratification."

Yet, "at other times, as in his involvement in the early stages of the French Revolution, this weak integration of contrasting characteristics led to simultaneous but quite different responses at different levels of activity.