Thomas Jefferson arrives in the American story as the author of a sentence so large that it keeps upstaging the life that wrote it. A young lawyer with a delicate voice and a ferocious pen composed a claim about equality that outgrew his century and then outgrew him. He spent the remainder of his days as its chief editor, annotator, evader, devotee, and sometimes defendant. He could make a paragraph sing with a clarity that feels like morning; he could order his household around practices that darkened the very light he admired. He believed ideas have architecture and built a house to prove it; he believed governments can be taught modesty and then used power with a deftness that made modesty look like theater. He was the republic’s most persuasive optimist and one of its most subtle realists, a gardener who planted liberty in sentences and then  ...