Mr. Jefferson's Women - Hardcover

Kukla, Jon

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1400043247 ISBN 13: 9781400043248

Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007

Synopsis

A pioneering study of Thomas Jefferson’s relationships with women in his personal life and in American society and politics.

The author of the Declaration of Independence, who wrote the words “all men are created equal,” was surprisingly hostile toward women. In eight chapters based on fresh research in little-used sources, Jon Kukla offers the first comprehensive study of Jefferson and women since the controversies of his presidency.

Educated with other boys at a neighborhood boarding school, young Jefferson learned early that homemaking was the realm of his mother and six sisters. From adolescence through maturity, his views about domesticity scarcely wavered, while his discomfort around women brought a succession of embarrassments as he sought to control his emotions. After Rebecca Burwell declined his awkward proposal of marriage, Jefferson reacted first with despondence, then with predatory misogyny, and finally with the attempted seduction of Elizabeth Moore Walker, the wife of a boyhood friend. His marriage at twenty-nine to Martha Wayles Skelton brought a decade of genuine happiness, but ended in despair with her death from complications of childbirth. In Paris a few years later, Maria Cosway rekindled his capacity for romantic friendship but ultimately disappointed his hopes. Against the background of these relationships, Kukla offers a fresh and cogent account of Jefferson’s liaison with Sally Hemings.

Jefferson’s individual relationships with these women are examined in depth in five chapters. Abigail Adams, the women of Paris, and the wife of a British ambassador figure in the first of two closing chapters that examine Jefferson’s attitudes toward women in public life. In the last chapter, Kukla draws connections between Jefferson’s life experiences and his role in defining the subordination of women in law, culture, and education during and after the American Revolution.

About this title

About the Author:

Jon Kukla received his B.A. from Carthage College and his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Toronto. From 1973 through 1990 he directed historical research and publishing at the Library of Virginia. From 1992 to 1998 he was curator and then director of the Historic New Orleans Collection. From 2000 to 2007 he was director of Red Hill–The Patrick Henry National Memorial in Charlotte County, Virginia. He now lives and writes in Richmond, Virginia.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Chapter One: Mr. Peterman’s Shirt

Jefferson disliked stuffy people, stuffy houses, stuffy societies. So he changed a few things: Law. Gardening. Government. Architecture.

Of the thousand castles, mansions, chateaux you can walk through today, only Monticello, only Jefferson’s own mansion, makes you feel so comfortable you want to live in it.
—J. Peterman Company

Thomas Jefferson did wear simple and comfortable shirts like the one that inspired a clever advertising copywriter for the J. Peterman Company’s retail catalogue. The claim that the style is “99% Thomas Jefferson, 1% Peterman”[1] may stretch the truth. Simple muslin work shirts were as common among Jefferson’s Virginia contemporaries as they were inside the great house at Monticello. Still, the rest of the copywriter’s pitch rings true.

Jefferson was an inventor.

He liked comfort.

And he did change a few things.

In 1776 Jefferson’s words declared American independence and encouraged a candid world to hope that all men were created equal. Ten years later his Statute for Religious Freedom summoned Virginians to insist that “Almighty God hath created the mind free.” Jefferson calculated the most efficient shape for the blade, or moldboard, of a plow. He modeled a new capitol for the commonwealth of Virginia, based on an ancient Roman temple, that established the classical revival as the standard for American public architecture. At Monticello he devised a mechanism, hidden beneath the floor between the entrance hall and parlor, to open both French doors simultaneously when either door was pushed. In the valley below Monticello he established Virginia’s first secular university. Farther to the west, Jefferson’s acquisition of the vast territory of Louisiana secured the navigation of the Mississippi River and changed the political geography of the nation and the world.

Jefferson did change a few things, but there were others that he left alone. He lived comfortably on a southern plantation as the master of about one hundred slaves, yet he contended that slavery was both a moral wrong and a political liability. He was content to hope that future generations might set things right for people of color. Comfort—whether in his mansion or in the muslin shirts that inspired J. Peterman—mattered to Thomas Jefferson. In his personal life, Jefferson was never entirely comfortable with strong and independent women. In politics, except for a brief moment in dialogue with Abigail Adams, his attitude toward women was immovable. Jefferson did nothing whatsoever to improve the legal or social condition of women in American society, and he was always wary of female influence in government.
Almost a decade ago I heard a distinguished panel of scholars discuss “Thomas Jefferson, Sally Hemings, and the DNA Evidence” at a historical conference in Fort Worth, Texas. The program committee had wisely placed the session in the large ballroom of the headquarters hotel. The place was full. DNA tests had recently confirmed a genetic relationship between Thomas Jefferson’s family and one of Sally Hemings’s children. That scientific evidence persuaded many previously skeptical historians (myself included) that the liaison between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings—a connection first alleged by James Callender in 1802, reasserted by Fawn Brodie in 1974, and finally rehabilitated by Annette Gordon-Reed’s persuasive book in 1997—was almost certainly true.[2]

The panel discussion in Fort Worth was informative, but I found the comments from historians in the audience more interesting. Someone in a tweed jacket was confident that “surely it was a loving relationship.” Two or three questions later someone else prefaced her question with the rejoinder that “surely it was rape.” In a conference at Charlottesville that same year, the late Winthrop Jordan witnessed a similar and, as he described it, “occasionally heated discussion, which centered on such terms as rape, concubinage, and marriage.” Professor Jordan doubted “that anyone today will ever know enough about the emotional contents of the Hemings-Jefferson relationship to understand it thoroughly,” and he suggested that “such labels do little to help our understanding.”[3] Nevertheless, people do ask the question.

As I listened to those earnest scholars venturing their opinions about the nature of Jefferson’s relationship with Hemings, my reaction was somewhat different from Professor Jordan’s. With the evidence so meager, it was obvious that despite our training, many of us in the audience were unthinkingly projecting contemporary values back into an earlier and perhaps different age. It also struck me that we historians would never get a handle on what Jordan called the “emotional contents of the Hemings-Jefferson relationship” without knowing more about how Jefferson interacted with other women. At the time I was busy writing about the Louisiana Purchase, but I made a mental note to consult Frank Shuffelton’s comprehensive bibliography of nearly everything written about Jefferson since 1826, where I expected to find a reliable book about Jefferson and women to assuage my curiosity. Many months later, however, when at last there was time to rummage through Shuffelton’s bibliography, I discovered that the book on Jefferson and women I had hoped to find was not there. This book, Mr. Jefferson’s Women, is basically one I wanted to read.

Many of my conclusions surprised me. To the fullest degree that the extant sources permit, I have sought to understand the significant women in Jefferson’s life not only through his eyes but also from historical evidence that is completely independent of his perceptions. Relationships between people, then or now, never entirely match the perspective of only one participant. The result, I think, is not a book that could be written by a young scholar. It is certainly not one I could have researched and written thirty-odd years ago when I began my first explorations of Virginia’s history. A few decades of work in the primary sources (and the accumulated joys and bruises of life) make a difference.
Thomas Jefferson’s personality was complex to the point of paradox. A sphynx according to one able biographer, he was a grieving optimist to another. For a man with so many talents and interests, the list of descriptive phrases could go on and on. In respect to his relationships with women, Jefferson was always self-absorbed and often a bit frightened. Both in private life and in public policy, Jefferson was less uncomfortable with married women than with their undomesticated sisters. Winthrop Jordan got it right almost four decades ago when he observed that for Jefferson “intimate emotional engagement with women seemed to represent . . . a gateway into a dangerous, potentially explosive world” and “female passion must and could only be controlled by marriage.”[4] After the wife of his neighbor and friend spurned his repeated advances, Jefferson married a widow. After her death, it was the talented and flirtatious wife of a fashionable artist who reawakened the widower’s heart in Paris. Finally, the light-skinned half sister of his late wife proved the exception to Winthrop Jordan’s formulation: marriage was not the only available means of control for the women in Jefferson’s life or polity. Enslavement also sufficed.

In the age of the American Revolution, gentlemen like Jefferson were acutely conscious of their personal as well as their political independence. Personal independence began with self-control. The most sublime compliment that one gentleman could offer to another, Virginians believed, was “that he was a master of himself!” In his relationships with women, Jefferson struggled for self-control throughout his early adulthood and once again in Paris. In Virginia during the Revolution, he was largely indifferent to women’s aspirations for educational opportunity, a voice in public life, or relief from the patriarchal strictures of English property law. During his years as minister to the court of Louis XVI, however, he became alarmed by the conduct of French women at court, in their salons, and eventually in the streets. When Jefferson returned from Europe, he was convinced that women posed a serious menace to republican government and American liberty.[5]

Jefferson may have been comfortable in simple cotton shirts, but his lifelong uneasiness around women is evident in his earliest surviving correspondence with friends from college. These letters, complained Jefferson’s sympathetic biographer Dumas Malone, “disclose a great deal which the mature man would not have relished.” “Worst of all,” he added, “they are full of references to girls.” Then or now, no sensible adult relishes all memories of adolescence. Comfortable or not, however, adolescence is where we must begin. There is scarcely any evidence from which to speculate about Jefferson’s youthful relationships with his mother and sisters. Our inquiry about Thomas Jefferson and the women in his life must begin in the circle of his college friends and the young women they sought to impress, to woo, and to marry. It begins not with a philosophic statesman relaxing in Mr. Peterman’s shirt but with an awkward youth imagining himself in “a suit of Mecklenburgh Silk” as he prepared for “the ball.” With an introverted youth asking his fraternity brother about a party he had missed—and wondering, with a self-consciousness that he never outgrew, “how I should have behaved?”[6] Our inquiry about Thomas Jefferson and women in the age of the American Revolution begins with his friends and classmates in Williamsburg and with the you...

About this edition

• Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 1400043247
• ISBN 13: 9781400043248
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 279