Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History Book

Continuing my trek through presidential biographies, I chose this one for Jefferson for two reasons. First, not much is actually known about Jefferson's life, for reasons I'll get into in a moment, and Brodie's book is an attempt to apply psychology to what we do have to deduce the parts we don't know. Second, DNA testing recently verified that Jefferson was almost certainly the father of a number of slave children, and Brodie's book was the first to assert that this was true, long before the testing is done, and I appreciated her reasoning.

Thomas Jefferson, though a prolific writer and a detailed recorder of facts, was a deeply private person. He destroyed all his wife's letters (and his letters to her, and all the copies) when she died, so we know very little about her. He also destroyed all records and correspondence during critical periods in his personal life, and was very careful in all his records and correspondence to hide references to anything socially unacceptable, leaving us with a myriad of facts about when various flowers bloomed and how much he spent on books, but nothing about who he really was.

Brodie quotes many of his letters, interviews with several of his slaves, and copies of letters sent by others to Jefferson to draw her conclusions. Jefferson was a man of many contradictions -- he strongly advocated and fought for emancipation and the end of the slave trade, but refused to free his own slaves, or even release them from their duties, as Washington did, and evidently was even willing to keep his own children by his slave Sally (who was only 1/4 black, incidentally, making his children by her legally white at 1/8 black) in slavery, though he gave them light duties until they ran away in adulthood. He also professed a deep friendship and admiration for John Adams, at the same time that he paid (over the course of several years) the infamous scandal journalist Callendar to defame him publicly. He seems to have been able to hold many contradictory views simultaneously, and was shocked and dismissive when these contradictions where pointed out to him.

The result of Brodie's analysis is a fascinating look at what might have formed Jefferson's views, and how they might have developed over time. While I understand the academic skepticism of this book (it is half history and half psychological analysis, which is certainly not history), I disagree with it, and think this book might reveal more about Jefferson than the lengthy biographies based only on his sparse official records. While I think Brodie sometimes reaches a bit for her conclusions, most of her reasoning is sound, and I appreciated the insights the book gave me into both Jefferson's times and his life.