A Companion to Thomas Jefferson by Francis D. Cogliano

Author:Francis D. Cogliano
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2011-08-09T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Thomas Jefferson and Affairs of the Heart

BILLY L. WAYSON

“In order to understand him,” Ellen Coolidge advised Grand Papa’s biographer, “You must understand those by whom he was surrounded” (Coolidge to Henry Randall, Coolidge 1856–1858, 64). Among all the women around Thomas Jefferson, the enslaved Sally Hemings is probably best known to the modern reader. She bore at least one and likely several of Jefferson’s progeny and helped stir two centuries of denials, outrage, racial enmity, and shame (Lewis and Onuf, 1999). This liaison has been treated superbly by Annette Gordon-Reed in her landmark book, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy (Gordon-Reed 1997) and is discussed elsewhere in this volume. Nearly as prominent is the married Anglo-Italian artist Maria Cosway. She joined Jefferson, American artist John Trumbull, and others for a six-day cavort through Paris in the fall of 1786 that was memorialized in an anguished paean describing the internal tension between the “head and heart” – reason and feeling – of her newly found friend (TJ to Maria Cosway, October 12, 1786, PTJ 10: 443–454). This act of self-disclosure was passed around among Maria’s acquaintances at the time, was published for the world in 1828 soon after his death, and with 24 others has been a useful lens to gaze at the inner Jefferson (Bullock, 1945). There were other women.

Vignettes of Jefferson’s life with some of the women surrounding him will be used here to provide a glimpse of the inner Jefferson (Burstein, 1995). The context for these stories is a cultural dynamic of the late eighteenth century that shaped not only his relationships with the opposite sex but also his views on a host of other subjects. Other important considerations in discovering the contours of Jefferson’s relations with women include: where he stood in his life course; his revealed emotional state and sense of self at the time; the construct of the human psyche he deployed; and, of course, the times in which he lived. As historian Joseph Ellis cautioned: “Lifting Jefferson out of that context and bringing him into the present is like trying to plant cut flowers” (Ellis 1996, 292). But a cut flower put in the proper medium can sprout the roots for new plants. Hopefully, what follows in the medium of sensibility and sentimentality will propagate some new branches to accompany those on Sally Hemings and Maria Cosway.

Jefferson was a sentimentalist – a person attentive to his own and other’s internal feelings. Besides the women – Maria Cosway, Angelica Schuyler Church, Anne Willing Bingham, and others – Jefferson was a participant in an Atlantic culture awash in an ethos of sensibility, sentimentality, and an ethical philosophy called “moral sense,” which was later labeled the “age of sensibility” (Frye 1956, 23: 2). The words “sensible” and “sentimental” were no less value-laden in his time than today (Knott 2009; Burstein 1999; Barker-Benfield 1992). The eighteenth-century meanings were like today’s “sensitive” or “empathic,” but there was a physical understory as well. External forces pass through

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