Books: Founding Father in Love

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THOMAS JEFFERSON: AN INTIMATE HISTORY

by FAWN M. BRODIE 591 pages. W.W. Norton. $12.50.

Thomas Jefferson is generally perceived as the philosopher-statesman nonpareil of the infant nation. His accomplishments affect and touch us still. He drafted the Declaration of Independence and championed the Louisiana Purchase. He founded the University of Virginia and built Monticello. Yet Jefferson the man remains an extraordinarily elusive and ambivalent figure. Historian Dumas Malone, one of the most acute Jeffersonists, ruefully wrote: "I flattered myself that some time I would fully comprehend and encompass him. I do not claim that I have yet done so, and I do not believe that I or any other single person can."

Fawn Brodie, a U.C.L.A. history professor, makes no such claim. Instead, she sets out to relate the canonized public Jefferson to the passionate, guilt-ridden private man whose sensual adventures have been glossed over by generations of sanctifying historians. Her "intimate history" is based on far-ranging research and a fairly free reading between the lines of Jefferson's published writings, his 18,000 extant letters to others, and some 25,000 that he received.

Love Letters. After the death of his wife Martha in 1782, when Jefferson was only 39, he attempted or actually engaged in liaisons with several women, all of whom, as Brodie suggestively phrases it, were "in some sense forbidden." Appropriately, it was in Paris that Widower Thomas Jefferson, 42, enjoyed his flashiest illicit idyl. As a trade negotiator for George Washington, and later Benjamin Franklin's successor as Minister to France, the lanky Virginian fell in love with Maria Cosway, a capricious Englishwoman married to an obnoxious painter and court toady in London.

Though this affair has been dismissed as a bagatelle by most biographers, the release by Jefferson's descendants in 1944 of 25 letters from Mrs. Cosway established beyond doubt that Tom and Maria had been deeply in love. At their parting, wrote Jefferson, he was "rent into fragments by the force of my grief." The letters were, in Brodie's words, "missives of such ineffable tenderness that they constitute the most remarkable collection of love letters in the history of the American presidency."

Even after publication of the billets doux, students of Jefferson described the affair as a platonic flirtation, despite Jefferson's classic love letter known as "My Head and My Heart." Written in one of his all too frequent depressions, it is an elegiac disquisition on the miracle of love-by a rationalist who did not believe in miracles.

During his five years in Paris, Jefferson was attended by his quadroon slave girl, Sally Hemings, who—to complicate matters—had been fathered by his father-in-law. Though she could have technically claimed freedom in France, Sally and her oldest son remained slaves when Jefferson returned to Washington in 1789 to become Secretary of State. Although the details of the relationship have never been clear, Brodie claims that in 38 years Jefferson had seven children by Sally Hemings. Her prominent place in Brodie's biography offers one of the few rational clues to Jefferson's ambiguous position regarding slavery.