It is arguably a good thing—and in no way
detracts from Andrew Burstein's absorbing
book—that Jefferson's Secrets does not quite
live up to its title. Secrecy, death, and
desire are the ingredients of the sensational,
even of the violent, and they consort ill
with the measure and scruple for which Thomas
Jefferson is still renowned. It might be better
to say that this study is an inquiry into
the privacy and reticence of a very self-contained
man, along with an educated speculation upon
the motives and promptings for his defensive
style.
Celebrated for many paradoxes, Jefferson was
especially notable as a revolutionary who
believed above all in order. Often ardent
in his partisanship for rebellion in America
and France (though somewhat less so when it
came to slave revolts in Haiti and the Old
South), he could seem airy and promiscuous
with regard to violence. Indeed, he rather
commended the Whiskey Rebellion as something
desirable for its own sake—"like a storm
in the atmosphere." Yet this expression in
itself furnishes us with a clue. The outbreak
of insurrection, like a storm, was necessary
to restore normality by relieving unnatural
pressure. The wisdom of nature had provided
such outlets precisely in order to forestall,
or to correct, what Jefferson was wont to
call—always pejoratively—"convulsions."
Burstein, a professor of history at the University
of Tulsa, acutely makes the connection between
what men of the Enlightenment considered "the
body politic" and what they thought about
bodily health. Here, the maxim Mens sana in
corpore sano was taken very seriously. Excess
was to be avoided, in diet and in matters
sexual, but so too was undue repression or
continence. A true philosophe ought to spend
as much time in exercise and labor as he did
with books and papers. He should emulate the
balance and symmetry of nature. He should
be careful about what he put into his system,
and cautious about any fluid disbursements
from it.
As president, Jefferson began to suffer intermittently
from diarrhea (which he at first cured by
what seems the counterintuitive method of
hard horseback riding), and though he was
unusually hale until his 80th year, it was
diarrhea and a miserable infection of the
urinary tract that eventually carried him
off. In one of his few profitless speculations,
Burstein quotes a s physicians, Dr. Thomas
Watkins (whose middle name was Gassaway),
in which gonorrhea is mentioned as a possible
cause of the persistent dysuria. It seems
plain from the context that Jefferson had
not contracted gonorrhea, but rather suffered
from the traditional woes of an old man's
prostate; Dr. Watkins was eliminating gonorrhea
as a possible cause, not diagnosing it.
However, the question of Jefferson's sex life
does have to be raised at some point. Here
again, we find a man who was afraid in almost
equal measure of too much gratification and
too little. His s Tristram Shandy. And it
must have been in Paris that he first had
carnal knowledge of Sally Hemings, who was
his late wife's half-sister as well as his
own personal property.
Burstein's chapter on this matter—which
is, after all, a fairly open "secret"—is
admirable. He doesn't waste time, as so many
historians have, in making a mystery where
none exists. It is obvious without any reference
to DNA testing that Jefferson took Sally Hemings
as his concubine and fathered several of her
children. And, if we look at the books in
Jefferson's library, and study the opinions
he uttered on related matters, we can readily
see how he would have justified the arrangement
to himself.
First came the question of bodily integrity.
The leading expert on sexual health at the
time, the Swiss physician Samuel Tissot, took
the view that intercourse of any kind was
far less ignoble and life threatening than
masturbation. Semen was provided for a purpose
and should be neither squandered nor pent
up. Knowing—and doubtless appreciating—this,
Jefferson had nonetheless to protect the memory
of his wife and avoid scandal in general.
As he was well aware, the ancient Greek method
of doing both these things, and of avoiding
venereal disease in the bargain, was to establish
a consistent relationship with a compliant
member of the household. Et voilà! A small
element of eugenics may have been involved
too, since Jefferson also believed that it
was necessary to people the earth and that
too many men of position wasted their generative
urges on alliances with unfit women. The children
he had with Hemings were sturdy and smart,
and they made very serviceable slaves on his
near-bankrupt estate until he kept his promise
to their mother to manumit them at adulthood.
Jefferson applied to himself the same method
of analysis he employed for scrutinizing the
universe and for anatomizing his beloved Virginia.
Surely such symmetry and order implied a design,
and therefore a designer? This deistic rationalism
was as far as most thinking people could go
in an epoch that just preceded the work of
Charles Darwin (who was born on the same day
as Abraham Lincoln). And Jefferson hit on
the same analogy arrived at by the "natural
philosopher" William Paley: the timepiece.
Even a person who did not know what a clock
was for would be able to tell that it was
not a vegetable or a stone, that it had a
maker.
Interestingly, Jefferson made more use of
this example as he got older, referring to
himself as "an old watch, with a pinion worn
here, and a wheel there, until it can go no
longer." Did he think that a creator's global
creation was subject to similar laws? He appears
not to have asked himself. But then, this
was a man who could oppose the emancipation
of slaves because he feared the "ten thousand
recollections" they would retain of their
hated condition, while almost in the same
breath saying dismissively that "their griefs
are transient."
In other words, and despite his notable modesty
and decorum, Jefferson was subject to the
same solipsism that encumbered all those who
lived before the conclusive analysis of the
fossil record and the elements of microbiology.
(He could never work out, in his Notes on
the State of Virginia, how it was that seashells
could be found so high up on the local mountains.)
On his Monticello mountaintop he was the center
of a universe of his very own, and he was
never quite able to dispense with the corollary
illusions. This is what makes the account
of his death so impressive. He wished to make
a good and dignified end, and to be properly
remembered for his proudest achievements,
yet he seems to have guessed (telling John
Adams that he felt neither "hope" nor "fear")
that only extinction awaited him. He certainly
did not request the attendance of any minister
of religion.
Burstein reproduces a verse of revolting sentimentality,
composed by Jefferson on his deathbed, in
which he promises his surviving daughter to
bear her love to the "Two Seraphs" who have
gone before. The lines seem ambivalent to
me, in that Jefferson speaks not so much of
crossing a boundary as of coming to an impassable
one: "I go to my fathers; I welcome the shore,
/ which crowns all my hopes, or which buries
my cares." Anyway, a moment's thought will
remind us that a designer who causes the deaths
of infant daughters to occur so long before
the death of their father has lost hold of
the argument from natural order, while a moment's
ordinary sympathy will excuse the dying and
exhausted man this last indulgence in the
lachrymose. The rest of Burstein's book has
already demonstrated the main and unsurprising
point, which is that the author of the Declaration
of Independence was in every respect a mammal
like ourselves. The only faint cause of surprise
is that this can still seem controversial.
