Jefferson Without Idealization

President John F. Kennedy welcomed the most famous American intellectuals to a White House dinner with the words, “I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered at the White House – with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.” JFK, perhaps the last American president to be able to get the leading American minds to break bread with him, reflecting the extraordinary esteem in which Jefferson (1743-1826) has been held. It is easy to put the builder of democracy, authorship of the “Declaration of Inde-

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pendence,” founding the Library of Congress and the University of Virginia, authorizing the Louisiana Purchase, keeping the U.S. out of the Napoleonic Wars during his presidency, his intellect and inventiveness, and for simply being one of the Founding Fathers. Yet, such idealization robs him of his humanity as a man of flesh and blood. As psychohistorians we note but resist such impulses as we keep a close eye on our countertransference to our subjects. This essay is a meeting report which has been enlarged to deepen our knowledge.

As members of the Psychohistory Forum’s Research Group on Psychoanalytic Autobiography and Biography on March 3, 2007 Thomas Cassilly (Montclair State University, political science), Ralph Colp (Columbia University, psychiatry), David Felix (CUNY Graduate Center, history), Mary Lambert (private practice, psychoanalysis) and this author (Ramapo College, history and psychoanalysis) gathered at Lee Shneidman’s home on West 86^th Street in Manhattan to discuss this Founding Father from the perspective of Fawn Brodie’s Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History. When W.W. Norton published her book in 1974 it was extraordinarily controversial because it argued that the tall Virginian remained sexual after the death of his beloved wife when he was thirty-nine years old and that he had sex with and fathered children by his slave mulatto mistress Sally Hemings. Brodie wrote about the resistance to accepting historical evidence in “Jefferson Biographers and the Psychology of Canonization,” in The Journal of Interdisciplinary History (1971). Though DNA studies have added further evidence in support of her argument that Sally Hemings was his mistress and that he was the father of her slave children, Brodie has never received the credit she deserves for her path breaking study of the third U.S. president, partly because of resistance to her psychoanalytic approach.

J. Lee Shneidman (Adelphi University) took the lead in the discussion because, although he is mostly known as a historian of early modern Spanish history, he is also the author of articles on Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton as well of the just completed book, Leading from Weakness: Jefferson’s Overt and Covert Foreign Policy: 1801-1807. Professor Shneidman did a quick survey of the literature,

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starting with Dumas Malone’s six volume Jefferson and His Times (1948-81), which is a wonderful study of our third president but is completely devoid of psychology. More recently, Joseph Ellis’ The American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson (1998) has provided good, more-up-to-date materials for psychological analysis, but again, this book is without insight into the psychodynamics, despite its claim to focus on character. Amidst the numerous books on the most intellectual of our Founders, Brodie’s Intimate History stands out as a beacon of psychological insight. In recognition of her contributions, a special “Fawn M. Brodie 25 Year Retrospective,” with articles by eleven scholars, was done in these pages last year (Vol. 13, No. 1 [June 2006], pp. 1, 29-66).

Beyond all the problems caused by his veneration, a major difficulty in studying Jefferson is that it is easy to take divergent positions regarding him. He not only held many contradictory positions, but he also covered his tracks as he sought to be viewed in the most favorable manner possible by his contemporaries and history. Yet, the copies he kept of all of his letters make it possible for the historian to trace the difference between his public and private positions on many issues.

When your view is not clouded by canonization it is easy to point out a large number of contradictions and limitations in Jefferson’s thinking and life. Here are some examples. This famous advocate of the democracy of the citizen farmer was himself an aristocratic planter. He could celebrate the farmer as the chosen of God while he employed slaves in his nail factory. He opposed urban manufacturing in the new country, but his plantation economy nail factory was an economic failure. (It lost money at least in part due to his poor management.) The “Sage of Monticello” loved Paris, where he felt quite a home, but despised New York, the most cosmopolitan of the colonial cities. He disliked the North, especially Connecticut which was the home of Yale University and the Congregationalists he as a deist so disdained; yet in the end he sought Northern support to become president. Despite his opposition to war he favored an imperialistic, and often devious, foreign policy. For example, he sent Lewis and Clark into the Northwestern lands (owned by native Americans and claimed by both Spain and England) to expand the new country to the Pacific so it would become a continental power at the expense of its neighbors.

The following examples will illustrate that Jefferson was opposed to a strong executive in theory, but favored it in practice when it served his purposes. In 1798 he secretly wrote the Kentucky Resolutions in opposition to an executive so strong that it could suspend due process for aliens, yet as president he doubled the size of the country when his officials made the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 without specific Senatorial consent or even consulting him about exceeding their mandate to buy more than New Orleans and West Florida (they did not get West Florida).

Thomas Jefferson, the advocate of the rights of man, proud author of the Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom and the lawyer who first publicly spoke up for human rights in legal defense of a slave he argued should be free under the laws of Virginia, lived as an aristocrat as a consequence of the labor of his slaves. He authored the Kentucky Resolutions in opposition to the very same Sedition Act he used against Tapping Reeves of Connecticut for speaking against slavery. He wrote with great force and eloquence, as in the “Declaration of Independence,” yet spoke so softly that he had to send rather than deliver his State of the Union Speech to Congress so that his words would be heard. The third president wrote that every generation should make its own revolution, which could easily have destroyed the new republic, yet he kept a tight rein on his own slaves lest they rebel.

There were many issues of which Thomas Jefferson clearly had little understanding and awareness of the needs of the new republic, such as of the nature and dangers of the revolutionary violence in France. He hoped to eliminate the Bank of the United States and the Supreme Court (or at least render it powerless), as he had the Navy—all of which were mistakes. After a letter he sent to a friend was opened and made public by a postal official, he never trusted the United States Post Office that Ben Franklin had started.

At our meeting considerable time was spent on Jefferson’s complex and contradictory relationship to slavery. He thought slavery deplorable and wanted to free his slaves, but he was perpetually in debt and in need of income from them. In fact, he even felt compelled to sell some of his own slave children. Furthermore, he lived in a society discouraging manumission, insisting that freed slaves must

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leave Virginia. While he was in revolutionary France, his slave Sally Hemings and her brother James, who was his chef and valet, were legally free and did not want to return to slavery in Virginia. This created a problem since Thomas was both quite possessive and emotionally dependent on Sally: he talked her into returning with him with mostly unfulfilled promises of freedom for Sally’s children at age twenty-one. James, who was told he would gain freedom after teaching French cooking to another slave at Monticello, was freed after seven years (Brodie, pp. 235, 243). Jefferson left a will freeing five of his slaves (two were apparently his sons). Sally Hemings was freed two years later by special arrangement with his white daughter who inherited Sally. The delay in manumission was apparently aimed at lessening gossip about Jefferson’s slave mistress at the time of his death (Brodie, pp. 466-467). By contrast George Washington, who never spoke out against Negro slavery and was not perpetually in debt, left a will freeing all of his slaves upon the death of his wife.

As well as the many contradictions within his belief system and behavior, our discussion focused mostly on the childhood, emotional life, and personality of the president from Monticello. His father Peter (1708-57) was a very large, enormously powerful, robust, and successful planter/land surveyor who married Jane Randolph (1720-76). Thomas was the third of ten children born to their union. However, his childhood and development would be greatly influenced by an arrangement Peter made with his wife’s kinsman William Randolph. Concerned for the well-being of their families in a period of high mortality, each agreed to care for the other’s family should one die. After the much richer Randolph died, the elder Jefferson built a house on his kinsman’s estates in the shape of an H with the three orphaned Randolph children in one wing and his own in the other. Though Thomas was the eldest son of his parents, he was bullied by the three older Randolph children within the household, which interfered with his development of self-confidence.

When Peter died suddenly in an epidemic at age forty-nine, freckle-faced, gangly, fourteen-year-old “tall Tom” became head of the household, but in fact he had familial responsibility without power, since he did not inherit slaves, property, or money until age twenty-one. Until then the power lay with the executors of his father’s estate and his mother. After being privately tutored he went to William and Mary College for two years and was admitted to the bar at age twenty-two. Most of his life was spent in Virginia.

At age twenty-eight Jefferson married the widow Matilda Wayles Skelton (1748-82) who brought her half sister Sally Hemings (1773-1835), a nine-year-old light-skinned slave with the same father. The future president was so emotionally connected to and solicitous of his wife that he frustrated George Washington and his revolutionary colleagues by his refusal to leave her to serve their common cause, especially when she was pregnant or ill, which was much of the time. Matilda died following childbirth leaving a distraught thirty-nine-year-old husband. Despite the disclaimers of those who idealized the third American president to the point of denying his sexuality, eventually Sally became Jefferson’s lover, and all her descendents carried Jeffersonian DNA. (Though the DNA match is not proof-positive of Thomas Jefferson’s personal relationship with Sally Hemings, it is supported by a variety of other evidence, including contemporary white Jeffersonians accepting the descendents of Sally Hemings at a family reunion.) This master/slave sexual arrangement, all too common in Virginia, was general knowledge in Monticello and vicinity. It became the cause of a scandal publicized by James Callender, to the delight of many of Jefferson’s political enemies, while being vociferously denied by his white daughters. Regardless of the political and social cost, with Sally, he was at peace.

From his correspondence we know a fair amount about Jefferson’s attitudes to women. With his mother, whose political sympathies were always with the British crown, his letters reflects an emotional coldness. He usually viewed women as fragile. His letters to his daughter Mary encourage her to be feminine rather than intellectual and to give in to her husband when they disagreed. Over a period of forty years beginning in his time in Paris as American envoy, he exchanged a romantic correspondence with Maria Cosway, wife of a well-known English painter (John P. Kaminski, Jefferson in Love: The Love Letters Between Thomas Jefferson and Maria Cosway [1999]). (It is worth noting that he married a widow who already had a child [who had died], had a lengthy relationship with a married woman almost entirely through correspondence, and had a long-term relationship with his slave-mistress-sister-in-law, but

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never simply married a young woman coming directly from her parents’ home.) Jefferson’s written words reveal nothing about his special relationship with Sally Hemings.

As noted by Lee Shneidman, compartmentalization was an extremely strong tendency in the third American president. He often acted as if his heart told him one thing and his head something else. Ralph Colp suggested that it is rare to find an individual who does not compartmentalize different elements of life. Mary Lambert argued that hysterics have problems keeping things separate and that women are much less inclined to compartmentalize than are men.

At one point in our discussion, Ralph Colp asked Mary Lambert to summarize her view of the Thomas Jefferson’s psychodynamics, resulting in the following sketch of a father-centered son.

Peter Jefferson was truly a frontier man, off on forays looking for virgin land to survey and acquire. His father loomed large in Thomas’ life, especially because he was never able to develop a close relationship with this formidable giant of a man, whose great physical powers he could never attain. Had Peter not died when his eldest son was too young to assess his virtues and limitations, he might have been able to accept the normal ambivalence that older children feel toward their parents. Without going into too much detail, Tom, in order to establish some equilibrium of character, used compartmentalization (splitting in psychoanalytic terms) as a defense against his rage. He was not able to establish his position as the first-born son with all its privileges until his twenties because of the family moving to the much larger Randolph plantation after the death of William Randolph when he was two years old. There he was bullied by older children who made him feel their superior class position. On the other hand, Peter, acting as surrogate father for the orphaned Randolphs made little distinction among the children, which left Tom to fend for himself because his mother was usually pregnant and otherwise engaged. Furthermore, his father on principal did not believe in the rights of the eldest son and therefore did not provide Thomas with a sense of his own importance. When his father died suddenly and left him at age fourteen responsible for his sisters and younger brother and running of the plantation, without giving him effective power, he was ill prepared to take over. Many of his obsessional characteristics were probably developed at that time. In addition, as Brodie notes, this experience left him quite ambivalent about power, which he craved, but then backed away from, much to the distress of his friends and political supporters.

To summarize, the death of his larger-than-life father when he was fourteen-years-old left Thomas focused on father issues throughout his life. Even as Secretary of State he competed rather unsuccessfully with Alexander Hamilton for the favor and support, as measured by attention and staff members he could hire, of the “father of the country”—George Washington. It should be remembered that Washington, who had no children of his own, referred to his junior officers and cabinet officials as his “family.” Jefferson was ambivalent about his pro-British mother—upon her death in 1776 he had an incapacitating migraine headache for two weeks keeping him from his revolutionary commitments. He preferred his women to be weak and dependent. Albert Gallatin’s (Secretary of the Treasury) suggestion that Jefferson appoint a woman to a high position was met with the response that that neither the country nor he was ready for this (Lee Shneidman is my source). Yet, Jefferson needed a woman desperately. It would have been most unusual if someone so responsive to women would not have entered into close relationships with a successor to his wife. His being a great charmer, a great talker on a one-to-one basis, does not lessen this overwhelming emotional need.

To David Felix, a biographer of Keynes, Marx, and Rathenau, accounts of Jefferson's life provide a classic case of denial by both the public and most biographers. The facts lay near the surface, but the pious stubbornly and counterfactually denied Jefferson’s humanity. To him, the Jefferson case also emphasizes the amount of denial in all biography and history. As in the Jefferson story, believers persist in denying flaws in their heroes and heroic historic episodes when the facts are similarly easily available—the examples of this are almost endless. The need is for what Professor Felix called “the denial of denial.”

The group’s attitude to Brodie’s Jefferson was mixed. First and foremost, there was appreciation for her pioneering psychobiography presenting our third president as a complex human being rather than the epitome of the Enlightenment in action. Investigation of his childhood and emotional needs en-

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abled us to better understand his public actions and contradictory beliefs. However, there was also frustration at her tendency to add psychoanalytic explanations to fill in gaps where she really does not have adequate explanations. Mary Lambert, strongly supported by Lee Shneidman and this author, was most vocal in stating this viewpoint, partly on the grounds that this inclination to fill in the gaps with theory keeps readers and researchers from digging more deeply for early childhood and other materials.

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