Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History

Description for THOMAS JEFFERSON: AN INTIMATE HISTORY by Fawn M Brodie:

This is a challenging new biography, a rich, three-dimensional intimate portrait which illuminates the relationship between Jefferson's inner life and his public life. Biographer Fawn M Brodie has made new discoveries and settled some ancient controversies. Where others have concentrated on Jefferson and the life of the mind, Mrs. Brodie has concentrated on Jefferson and the life of the heart, describing for the first time the largely unknown man of feeling and passion. With her characteristic meticulous scholarship she has examined his ambivalences concerning revolution, religion, power, race, and love---ambivalences which exerted a subtle but powerful influence on his political writing and his decision-making. The result is a complex and fascinating portrait which adds a wholly new depth to the portraits of the the past.

Though Jefferson left a legacy of 18,000 letters, he went to some pains to conceal his intimate life, much of which was tragic, and his heirs continued to hold back the publication of material which they felt might too much illuminate it. He himself destroyed his correspondence with his mother, and also his letters to his wife, who died after what Jefferson called ten years of "unchecquered happiness." He kept, however, his letters from Maria Cosway, the English artist with whom he fell in love in 1786, and copies of his letters to her. Most of these were kept hidden by his descendants until 1945.

The details of Jefferson's liaison with his quadroon slave, Sally Hemings, half-sister of his dead wife---a story which first surfaced in the press of 1802---have long been lost in a labyrinth of controversy and indignant denial. Mrs. Brodie, examining the Jefferson record with an eye to nuance and metaphor as well as ideas and action, and delving into unused newspaper and manuscript sources, has reconstructed this story with clarity and compassion.

But this biography contains much more than an examination of Jefferson's affection for women who were in an important sense forbidden. It looks also at the impact of Jefferson's parents, especially his mother, on the life of a young revolutionary. it describes the impact of the deaths of his children during his traumatic period as war governor of Virginia. it describes the great Jefferson friendships with Adams and with Madison and Monroe, the difficult filial relationship with Washington complicated by the volatile rivalry with Hamilton, and his spectacular public feud with Aaron Burr. It reconstructs his tender but despotic relationship with this two daughters, especially the eldest, and the resulting complications in her own marriage to the turbulent Thomas Mann Randolph.

We see in this volume Jefferson's passion for order and his detestation of violence, developing during his presidency into What Henry Adams called his "genius for peace". We see also the aging statesman, who described himself as living "like a patriarch of old," trapped in the slave-holding world, slipping into ever-growing apathy toward emancipation. In the end we see him rousing himself to denounce slavery in words so memorable they would not be surpassed till the coming of Abraham Lincoln.