Jefferson
- A
Life
By Willard Stern Randall, Henry Holt and
Company, Inc.,1993, 708 pages
Reviewed by Nita K Curry
October 30, 2000
Here was buried
Thomas Jefferson
Author of the Declaration of American Independence
Of the Statute of Virginia for religious freedom
and Father of the University of Virginia.
This was the epitaph Thomas Jefferson designed for himself.
What is interesting and odd is that he didn’t even mention that he had served
as President of the United States for eight years.
Most of us would have put that first on our tombstone, but he decided to
only put those accomplishments he was most proud of in his lifetime.
In Willard Sterne Randall’s biography, we discover a man
who was born of humble circumstances, yet through his father’s marriage to
Jane Randolph he was born in a family who had a noble lineage.
It seems that Jefferson had a strained relationship with his mother
throughout his life, but that it became increasingly so after his father’s
death while Jefferson was in his teens. There
remain few letters that give us even a hint at this relationship.
This may not seem too strange in our world of letterless relationships,
but Jefferson wrote some twenty-eight thousand letters in his lifetime.
When one leaves behind such an avalanche of correspondence
it makes it much easier for others to determine your feelings without an untold
amount of speculation. Unfortunately
for Jefferson, despite these letters and over 80 years of life, historians and
writers still can’t seem to get all of the story right.
Jefferson was a private, studious man.
He received his law degree after years of study and apprenticeship, but
only practiced a few years before becoming involved in politics.
It was a sense of duty that drove him into the arena of policy making.
The United States was in the throes of determining their stance with
England and Jefferson’s home state of Virginia was paving the way for a
newfound government. Jefferson
spent hours away from his family and beloved home Monticello because of this
sense of duty. As a result, a
precursor to the Declaration was drawn up and Jefferson established himself as a
vital part of the new United States.
When looking at the life of Jefferson, you not only see a
leader who worked with so many great men in a time ripe with opportunity, but
also a man who suffered many personal tragedies.
Not only did he have several children die right after birth, several
others never lived until adulthood. And
because of a promise made to his wife on her deathbed (to never remarry and make
their two living daughters have a horrible step-mom like she had) a floodgate of
future speculation regarding Jefferson’s personal liaisons would mar his
political life and his integrity through our present day. Randall wrote this book before DNA testing was so readily
accessable and he asserts in his text that to speculate that Jefferson had a
liaison with his slave is ludicrous for several reasons.
One is that Jefferson was in love with a married woman at the time and
two, that the time when he supposedly began the affair Sally Hemings, she was
only a child. Today DNA testing has
determined that the genes of a Jefferson are part of the Hemings lineage; what
they cannot prove is whether it was Thomas Jefferson’s DNA.
It really is something that one will never be able to completely get
peace on, but there is no reference, no love letter nothing that substantiates
Jefferson’s affair with Hemings in all of his thousands of letters.
Much of Randall’s book on Jefferson lingers on legal
issues that Jefferson mulled over when determining the state of the union.
For me, it became somewhat monotonous as he explained issue after issue
that didn’t seem to fit into a larger picture.
Still, the man Jefferson is so fascinating and complex that any honest
biography can’t but be likewise. There are so many facets of Jefferson that it
really surprises me that Randall was able to contain the book to only 595 pages.
For instance:
·
He is a man who owned slaves, but believed in their emancipation
and tried to establish this in his policy making.
·
A man who loved Monticello so deeply that he was thousands of
dollars (in the early 1800s!) in debt because of his non-stop extensive
construction. His solution, as he
lay dying, was a lottery. He would
offer up parcels of land in order to pay off his debts and free up any burdens
for his children. What he didn’t
realize was that the law stated that the entire state had to be included in the
lottery. It is still privately held, owned and maintained.
·
On July 2, 1826 Jefferson roused enough to give his daughter a
small jewelry box that was not to be opened until after his death.
As the hours wore on, he would stir enough to ask, “Is it the fourth
yet?” This continued until 12:50
p.m. on the Fourth of July 1826 when he finally stirred no longer.
It was 50 years to the day
of the signing and ratification of the Declaration of Independence. Interestingly, John Adams his friend, enemy, co-patriot and
co-author of the Declaration died that very same day.
Not only can we thank Thomas Jefferson for one of the most
wonderfully written and thought-provoking pieces of governmental documents, but
we can thank him for resisting a monarchy,
and a country that more than
doubled under his leadership. He
wasn’t a perfect man, but to me he was a great president. To him, he wasn’t¾and
so our fascination with him continues…
ninetyandnine.com
Article © 2000, Nita K. Curry
-------
Nita K. Curry is
the editor for the letters page.
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