With his rhetorical awareness, Thomas Jefferson has successfully turned himself into a character, and responses to the darker sides of this founding father have resembled that of readers expecting consistency in a fictional character. However, like a modernist character, Jefferson could be inconsistent—liberal and racist : these « contradictions » inaugurated a Southern strategy of response to criticism on race relations, which can be fruitfully compared with the discourse of Ike McCaslin in Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses .