The Very Private Jefferson

...No statesman in American history, however, has left us a greater mass of letters, drafts and other writings...

...At times, in fact, her historical slips are embarrassing...

...This reveals that Sally gave birth to five children between 1795 and 1808, and that although Jefferson was away from Monticello about two-thirds of the time, he was at home nine months prior to each birth...

...following the death of his own wife, Martha Skelton Wayles, whom he had married when she was a 23-year-old widow, he had his romance with Maria Cosway...

...To begin with, we have the fifth volume of Dumas Malone's magisterial biography, which covers the second term of Jefferson's Presidency and pursues its leisurely way toward an appraisal of the concluding phases of his career...

...He did regard the Revolution as both completed and continuing, but he seems to have applied the doctrine that the earth belongs to the living exclusively to long-term debts and the protection of copyrights and patents for a term of 19 rather than 14 years...

...But one may quarrel with her about how completely satisfying Jefferson found his married life in retrospect, or whether the Maria Cosway affair was ever consummated...

...Erikson regards this juxtaposition of height and downfall, of sublime emotions and headaches, as very significant...

...Jefferson the President: Second Term, 1805-1809 By Dumas Malone Little, Brown...

...It should be pointed out, however, that Jefferson sounded a lot more revolutionary than he and most of his American contemporaries actually were, including James Madison...

...And this last relationship is of critical importance in evaluating Jefferson's attitude toward slavery and the blacks, his view of Negro inferiority, his unwillingness in his later career to draw down the censure of his region by pressing for emancipation, and the secretive way he provided for the freedom of Hemings' children...

...When, as President, he was confronted with a Chief Justice who advocated a contrary doctrine upholding the sanctity of contracts, he signally failed to press its relevance to that principle...

...Jefferson fastidiously destroyed all letters to or from his wife...

...14.50...

...Yet here Winthrop Jordan's White Over Black is far more penetrating than Brodie's study, which leans heavily upon that earlier, landmark work...

...Reviewed by Richard B. Morris Author, "Seven Who Shaped Our Destiny: The Founding Fathers as Revolutionaries" With the approach of the Bicentennial, a spate of studies about the leaders of the American Revolution, about the Revolution as a civil war, about the Revolution then and now has begun to spew from the presses...

...Finally, the news arrived from Europe that a preliminary peace had been signed, and since his presence was no longer needed, Congress withdrew the commission...

...This wave of new literature is already serving to heighten the fascination that the transformation—the rise and decline, if you will—of the American republic has held for foreigners from Alexis de Tocqueville's day to Raymond Aron's, as well as for U.S...

...For to flaunt a liaison with a married woman who was also a devout Catholic might have been comme il faut in Paris...

...Erikson concedes that to ascertain his subject's "inner workings" all the data available must be reviewed, but pleads lack of time and inaccessibility for not doing so...

...Scholarly and sympathetic, Malone eschews psychobiographical techniques and gives Jefferson the benefit of every doubt, drawing the veil discreetly over aspects of his private life and discovering comfortable explanations in defense of his role in the prosecution of Federalist newspaper editors...

...Indeed, the phrase prompts him to affirm how each new generation carries within it a conscience "weighted down with debts of guilt as well as of compliance implanted in the helplessness of childhood...

...He himself confessed to having made improper advances to Mrs...

...704 pp...

...So it is hardly surprising that no fewer than three books have appeared this spring devoted to probing the mind and operations of the man who, save for Benjamin Franklin, proved to be the Revolutionary Era's most notable exemplar of the Enlightenment...

...Yet most of all we find here some admirable cautions against the misuses of psychohistory and the dangers of treating a man's writings as if they were free associations uttered in the course of clinical therapy...

...Like other students before him, Erikson is intrigued by Jefferson's observation that "the earth belongs to the living...

...Brodie is entitled to her speculations about these relationships, as are other biographers...

...Yet what distinguished their leadership was not their private passions but their sense of public duty, their commitment to anticolonialism and independence, to the goals of the new nation, to republicanism, constitutionalism, tolerance, civil liberties, and—in Jefferson's case, whether or not his professions accorded completely with his practices—to egalitarian-ism...

...For the historian, moreover, he was a tantalizingly complex person, whose life was marked by tragedies and triumphs, an intense privacy and an intense need to dominate in the political arena...

...Nor is Brodie of much help with the larger questions of how Jefferson's private life affected his public positions...

...125 pp...

...and though Julian P. Boyd has so far published only 19 volumes (to 1792) of a contemplated 60-vol-ume edition of Jefferson's papers, other extensive collections are in print and the entire correspondence is on microfilm...

...What meager analysis Erikson provides is based upon Jefferson's only book, Notes on the State of Virginia (1781), and his scissors-and-paste edition of the New Testament, begun in his leisure hours while President...

...Having a secret slave mistress, though, perfectly accorded with the mores of a Virginia gentleman...

...Still, he does note that the introspective Jefferson always sought to achieve excellence, despite the pain it could cost him, and that he suffered "a violent headache" when he looked down from the height of the Natural Bridge...

...She confuses the vote on and the signing of the Declaration of Independence...

...Except for his well-documented romance with Maria Cosway in Paris, Jefferson's views of women, sex and marriage are shrouded in reticence, but ever so often a small flicker of light can be glimpsed through the chinks of privacy...

...There are other aspects of Jefferson's life that might have profited from similar psychological analysis: his longtime pattern of alternating between commitment and withdrawal, his lack of stamina and staying power when the going got rough, and his hungering for the affection and approval of older men —notably evidenced upon the death of the father he so greatly admired...

...and our information about Sally Hemings derives from the later claim of Madison Hemings that he was the son of the President, from the striking resemblance of some of the Hemings children to him, and from the circumstantial facts offered by Jefferson's Farm Book...

...On an entirely different level are Erik H. Erikson's Jefferson Lectures of 1973, just published under the title Dimensions of a New Identity...

...When one ponders the durable values implicit in the American Revolution, what comes to mind first and foremost is the Declaration of Independence and, of course, its author, Thomas Jefferson...

...I opened this slim volume with considerable expectations...

...in the less cosmopolitan reaches of Virginia it would have spelled finis to a public career...

...Unfortunately, Erikson declines to comment on such facets of the psyche of this obsessive-compulsive personality...

...John Walker, the wife of a friend and neighbor...

...It may be titillating to many readers to learn that the Founding Fathers could and did behave as other men...

...There are misogynous outbursts, a fear of women as sexual aggressors, and the fact that after Rebecca Burwell repelled his youthful overtures, the only white women who attracted him were either married or formerly married...

...In addition, Brodie's excoriation of Chief Justice John Marshall's behavior at the treason trial of Aaron Burr gives the impression that, notwithstanding the clear and concise definition of treason laid down in the Constitution, Marshall should have had Burr hanged for constructive treason...

...She says Jefferson turned down the offer to serve as a peace commissioner, but the record shows that after the death of his wife he accepted the appointment, journeying first to Philadelphia and then to Baltimore, where he waited some three and one-half months for the French frigate on which he was booked to sail...

...Fawn M. Brodie subtitles her study "An Intimate History," and it serves to confirm what other scholars have suggested about Jefferson's extramarital relationships...

...5.95...

...Now the master of psychohistory would demonstrate how its methods should be applied and inform us about Jefferson's identity crises, as he did with Martin Luther and Mahatma Gandhi...

...Would she have wanted an unscrupulous subsequent administration to have such a weapon in its arsenal...

...citizens...

...Only in the case of Maria Cos-way do we have correspondence...

...our knowledge of the Walker affair comes from its ventilation by her husband and his own private grudging admission...

...and thereafter he kept as a mistress Sally Hemings, a slave quadroon who bore him no fewer than five children, four of whom lived...