Ellen Wayles Randolph Coolidge has all but been forgotten by history. Those who know her name associate her with Thomas Jefferson, her nation-building grandfather who once authored The Declaration of Independence. During her life she functioned as, and behind-the-scenes, played a major role as Jefferson's biographer and apologist, educating others about his personal life and defending him against some of his harshest critics. Yet, like many women of the nineteenth century, she was not a public figure. While she wrote incessantly, she never published her own writings....

I begin by writing briefly about Coolidge's life, her insatiable love of learning, how she was conditioned by her Enlightenment Era education under the tutelage of her grandfather, and the conversational abilities for which she was praised by her contemporaries. Next, I explore Coolidge's intellectual rhetoric and the ways in which she utilized her travel diary as a site to lay the groundwork for establishing a distinctive and potentially powerful rhetorical identity. Then, I turn to the critical rhetoric that Coolidge develops in her personal correspondence and consider how her criticisms of her more radical contemporaries and her efforts at translation helped to position her to more fully express a sense of rhetorical agency. Finally, I consider how Coolidge assumes authority in her editorial correspondence with Jefferson's biographer, mobilizing a mature rhetoric of defense where she functions as apologist and biographer to defend, and arguably shape, not only her grandfather's legacy but our collective understanding of Jeffersonian democracy and American identity itself.