Last night my husband and I watched a PBS film about Thomas Jefferson. It was three hours, but we became so absorbed that we sat through the whole thing. We both ended up not liking the man as much as we expected to. He was a "Southern Gentleman" in all the ways I find abhorrent, and the slavery issue is just an impossible fact to get over. I sympathized with the many deaths in his family, but not his indulgences and running up of debts and then, of course, there is the issue of Sally Hemings. She was 14 years old when he probably began his sexual alliance with her, and he never acknowledged or freed her or his children during his lifetime. His constant work on Monticello reminded me of the Winchester Mystery House, and though the landscape is beautiful, it is not a lovely house. I grant his way with words; he was a beautiful writer, but he didn't do much as President, unless the Louisiana Purchase is your empiric idea of joy. He mourned the death of his fragile young wife, but six children in ten years is what killed her. Perhaps some restraint would have been in order.
Anyway, my husband and I surprised ourselves by liking John Adams much better, for his forthrightness, his abolitionist efforts, his energy and passion. Jefferson was a kind of diletante, and he was not a man reconciled to his own contradictions. The film calls him mysterious, but underlying that is discomfort with some very obvious facts of his life. I sense someone pursuing distractions and fine wines and the propertied gentleman's life over responsibility and integrity. He was infinitely handsome, and perhaps that has swayed historians, as it does many of us.
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