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Andrew Burstein, "Being Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History" (Bloomsbury, 2026)
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- [00:00]
A
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B
Hello, everyone, and welcome to New Books Network. I'm Mark Clovis, and today I'm speaking with Andrew Burstein, author of the book Being Thomas Jefferson, An Intimate History. Andrew, welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:19]
C
Good to be with you, Mark.
- [01:20]
B
Well, it's good to have you on our podcast. I was wondering if you could start us off by telling our listeners something about yourself. Sure.
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C
I came to the study of early America and Jefferson in particular, in a rather roundabout way. In college, I majored in Chinese, and this was in the early 1970s, so before and after Nixon went to China. I was fascinated by the Chinese written language, the depth that you could read into it, the poetic symbolism, just in the ideographs, the Chinese ideographs, Chinese calligraphy, I love to this day. Although around 1990 is when I shifted from the study of Chinese culture and language and history to early America, I found that Jefferson's writing exhibited a unique energy. And why was it that Jefferson was better remembered for his language than any of the other members of the founding generation? No one refers to George Washington's rhetoric or Madison's outside of the not so easy to read Federalist Papers. Hamilton, as well, bright as he was, is not memorable for anything he said. And Jefferson is unusual because he still speaks to us today. His Personality comes through his penmanship, his melodic cadence, the emotional power, in a word, the lyricism that he brings to the page. And his was a time when your identity as a writer meant more to your social or political stature than I mean, Patrick Henry is the exception at the American Revolution. But nothing Patrick Henry wrote and little of what he said remains in historical memory. Jefferson, it's not just that FDR gave him a memorial in Washington D.C. on his 200th birthday in the middle of World War II. He has always symbolized American political culture generation by generation. So I found myself drawn to him and specifically my doctoral dissertation dealt with his, with epistolary culture and Jefferson as a self expressive, later letter writer. And then I compared his private writings to his public writings and everything from metaphor imagery to his intellectual philosophical background. There is something about Jefferson that has intrigued me for the last three and a half decades. And effectively he's the window for me as a scholar to the life of the mind in early America. I ask questions like did they think like us? In what ways? On an emotional level, you know, in that five mile an hour world and what, what way were they like us? And these are the, or not like us. And these are the kinds of questions that led me to specialize in the sub genre of cultural history and emotional history. So I do actually take it back to my fascination with what you could learn by just looking at a non alphabetic language. How much is embedded in language that we take for granted.
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B
It's something that I, you know, hearing you explain this in light of what you write in the book, I'm making certain connections my mind. It really is interesting how your book is not exclusively ordinarily about Jefferson as a writer, but that really is such an approach. And it's one of these things that might sound self evident. Of course you're going to approach Jefferson through the written word because that's the medium in which so many historians function. But that idea of how Jefferson constantly used writing to shape his image, it was not just he wrote and he came out, you describe, he's very conscious about these, it's very studied how he's presenting himself in so many textual formats that you describe.
- [06:35]
C
This is exactly why he was successful as a politician when he could stay at an inn and when you traveled on the road. Visual culture really only existed in the artist's rendering of an individual. He could travel most of his life from Monticello central Virginia to Philadelphia to New York and not be recognized. And you know, he dressed it down, identified with that you know, common man. I mean, he was an aristocrat who tried to show that he was just a regular guy. He was quiet. So what made him a good politician was how seductive he was with his pen and his unique emotional connection on the page in private letters, private communications. And curiously, he didn't keep a diary, a lot of people did. But he was very well organized with a mathematical calculation whether it was what was happening in his garden or the clothing that he was purchasing for enslaved people, the weather he measured at the same time, twice a day, every day. These kinds of things show. I wouldn't clinically call it ocd, but maybe that had something to do. His sense of personal organization had something to do with the sensitivity he showed in writing to people where he knew what the recipient was comfortable hearing. And he massaged them in that way from afar. He had this unique ability to understand who his audience was, which was also how he very consciously, you mentioned this self consciously constructed that man of the people identity. And he had an unusual ability to marvel in his letters. So this is why for correspondence and the Declaration of Independence, we'll probably get into in his work with the emotional and emotional commitment to expressing both ideas and affection, he had an almost sublime way of writing. So I'll give you an example to show his commitment, his empathy for the person he's writing to, in this case a woman, and studying the difference between how he wrote to political men. How he wrote to women is interesting too, but this is to a woman. And he had discussed the death of his own wife with her and how heartbroken and nerve wracked he was. So he writes to her and what more sublime delight than to mingle tears with one whom the hand of heaven hath smitten. If you are an educated, artistic woman as she was, you feel his heartbeat on the page. And that was a unique ability. Here's a second example that I love and I haven't memorized everything, but if, if it's, it's, if it's just a paraphrase, it's a good paraphrase. Leaving the Cabinet when Alexander Hamilton had bested Jefferson, as I describe him as the stronger, Machiavellian. They were both in politics, Machiavellian in their approaches to getting their way. So he wrote, Jefferson is leaving because he can't get to, he can't, he can't undo Hamilton's influence on President Washington. So he was Secretary of State at the time. And he writes to James Madison. Madison is his political alter ego. And he can tell Madison he doesn't have to tell Madison that this letter or this phrasing is meant to be extracted, put in the newspapers and everyone would see, you know, Jefferson is the victim of Hamilton, but the way he does it, he writes to Madison this the motion of my blood no longer keeps time with the tumult of the world. And it goes on to say something about I yearn for the lap of my family and watching the garden blossom and, you know, and elsewhere. He calls himself a son of nature. He constructs for the public this perfect man. And yeah, so another example of this seductive pen of his is how he reflects on his wounded spirit, saying something like this will only be cured by the all healing grave. And he did hold grudges for the balance of his lifetime. I mean, there were people like Patrick Henry, who even after Henry was dead, he wanted to make sure that he went down in history as being forgettable because Jefferson was jealous of his success, his charisma. So he would talk about how write to anyone who was listening that what was wrong with Patrick Henry and why he shouldn't be celebrated as well. Yes, in Jefferson's words, he got the ball rolling in the American Revolution, but he was all tongue without head or heart. This kind of use of language for political gained is a part of Jefferson's identity that few biographers have really gotten into. And frankly, I think that understanding language anchors us in a usable past. And when I think of Jefferson, just as when I think of Chinese, you can see the derivation or the evolution of an idea through consistency and change in linguistic expression. I mean, I'm not saying that this is the only way to get inside their heads, but it's one of the tools of the cultural historian that I delight in. And the other one I've discovered only in the last 15, 20 years is how medicalized metaphors distinguish Jefferson. Everybody bought books of domestic medicine. That was the title of one that everyone owned. But Jefferson had this way of treating psychoneurological language as a way of exploring the human condition. So he will refer to the gloomy hypochondriacal minds, the inhabitants of diseased bodies. And these are the people, you know, the Federalists, his political enemies, that they have a neurological weakness that prohibits them from embracing political democracy, and they've obliges them to yield to the strong man. I mean, I know exactly how Thomas Jefferson would write about Donald Trump. He would go right to. He would go right to. And I usually don't, you know, leave his lifetime to make those kinds of connections to analogize but he. This was the Enlightenment, was the age of not just thoughtful philosophy, you know, like Locke and the Scottish philosophes and the like. It was also, the Enlightenment was also a time of studying the human condition on a very visceral level about urges, passions. You know, reason versus passion is the obvious, you know, sort of black and white distinction. But it went way beyond that. So it was interdisciplinary. And appetite, you know, I mean, for us to study Jefferson's or those people of those generation, their sexual appetite is still. It's. It's not lurid. It's. It's part of their. Their anxieties. It's part of how they define themselves as social beings. So there's so much more to the Enlightenment than what has traditionally been taught. And again, it's language that takes us there. It's the nuances of language. If you read people's letters, you see that they're more open than most historians, especially political historians, have encountered. New Year, New Me. Cute, but how about New Year, New Money? With Experian, you can actually take control of your finances, check your FICO score, find ways to save and get matched with credit card offers, giving you time to power through those New Year's goals. 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B
And I think that really helps to inform the approach you take in your book. And it's an approach. It's embodied in the title and it's something that you talk about in your introduction, which is a question that I think that it's a question a lot of people ask themselves about. But I don't know if it's been asked by as many people who have written about him, which is this question of what was it like to be Thomas Jefferson? I mean, I think it was a question. When I read it, I'm thinking to myself, we know him as the face on Mount Rushmore. We know him as the marble figure in the monument. We know him as the face on the nickel. And we have all this representation of him and we talk about his achievements, the Declaration of Independence, his presidency, all that come with it. And yet it strikes me that all of that and the language and what he writes can sometimes obscure that thought of what was he like as a person? Was he someone who was constantly declaiming issuing we the people. Or was there more to it than that? And I thought that was fascinating about how you use that context, the things you were just describing, to really give a sense of Jefferson the human in the context of that time. So why did you take that particular approach? And how did it in some ways change your perception or define your perception of Jefferson and his achievements?
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C
What changed with this book? And the reason why? After writing for years about Jefferson, I decided once more, I retired years ago. And I always. After each book, I think, okay, I'm done with him. I've said all that I need to say, and then I discover something else. So what really got me into this book project was how he hid his ambition, how he ultimately chased celebrity. And that's a theme of the book that kind of crept up on me because I was initially in graduate school, enamored with his language and the literary reference points that he drew upon. So I used literary analysis to a certain extent. Then what I discovered in the book I wrote, called Jefferson's Secrets, that came out 20 years ago was after the DNA results, the connection to his enslaved. Well, his wife's. His late wife's half sister, whom he owned, Sally Hemings. Of course, I looked at the neurophysiological language about his take on life, death, the spirit, and how he could rationalize how he justified, how he excused himself. So living as an aristocrat on his private mountaintop, thinking that he's in charge. And whenever he leaves the mountaintop, that's when his anxieties kick in. That's when his gastrointestinal problems begin. That's when his migraines occur. He called them periodical headaches. And they began when he started the profession of the law in 1764, and they didn't end until he was in his mid-60s and retired from the presidency. So when he comes back to Monticello, this private world where he can communicate with people around the world from his private. He called it the Cabinet, the little library adjacent to his bedroom. And he had by then developed such confidence in himself, even while harboring all this vengeful thought about the Hamiltons and the John, Supreme Court, Chief Justice John Marshall and the people who weren't seduced by Jefferson. He came to believe himself the republic's savior. And he wanted to go down in history. You ask, who was Jefferson? Well, he wanted to go down in history as the republic savior, that George Washington was the man without whom the revolution could not have succeeded. He grants Washington, because you couldn't go up Against Washington and in the national mind, he's everybody's supreme hero. But in order to convey to posterity the importance of Jefferson's contributions to America, it wasn't the Declaration of Independence, it was the Revolution of 1800, which was in retirement, how he denoted his election to the presidency. But he frames it as it's not me, it's the people, and I'm sort of just a messenger of the people that he intuited the popular will and he preserved the republic from descending into a muddied aristocrat run proto monarchical, that sort of devastating return. The Hamiltonians would win that the Anglophiles would win, that America would be back within. I mean, they were always in the cultural orbit of Britain. And even to a certain extent, you look at the common law, the legal orbit of Britain, there were only subtle changes that took place in American culture. It wasn't until really the 19th century that the American publishing industry had homegrown writers of note. And it wasn't until the third decade of the 19th century that Europeans paid any attention to American writing. So Jefferson started out by conceiving America's moral superiority over the old world. And that's embodied in the Declaration of Independence and especially in his first inaugural address, where he refers again this beautiful psychoneurological, metaphorical imposition on the mind of the reader. He refers to the agonizing spasms of infuriated man, meaning the kinds of religious wars and king versus king in traditional European affairs, and that America was immune to that because he had, again moving on in his first inaugural, restored to social intercourse that harmony and affection without which liberty and even life itself are but dreary things. I remember these words because, you know, this is the. They're words that are living and breathing, and they convey a living, breathing Jefferson. I'm trying not to mythologize him because I try to capture him in his psychological complexity. But you can see both a smug politician who thinks he's right about everything and thinks that without him America would not have survived as a republic. He disguised his ambition very well, and it worked on a lot of people for a long time. But what I am showing in this book is that by reading him through a new lens, seeing all of these distinctions between how his private communications express a personality, how he adapts, that when he's writing political pieces, he's in charge of the written word like no one else. And this is why he has succeeded in capturing the attention, capturing the minds of Americans for 200 and some odd years.
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B
And That's. I was thinking, as you're describing all this, about how so much of that comes through his writing. He likes to present himself in certain ways. And what you do in the book is you really, you use the writings, but you also look past them. And I think you see that especially when you're talking about your early chapters where you're getting at the sort of Jefferson that we don't necessarily think about, which is the Jefferson who's the awkward youth. The, the Jefferson who is the young man discovering himself sexually. I mean, it was kind of funny to see that Jefferson was what we might today call, you know, cougar bait. You know, having relationships with older women, that's something that we think about. And yet it's so vital to understanding who Jefferson is as a person in terms of this. It makes him so much more, more, more relatable, I found as I'm reading it.
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C
Yeah, well, I would say that it's not. I mean, his attraction to older women is non sexual. His attraction to married women is something that begins early. And at the same time, like most young white teenage children of, of the planter aristocracy, he must have gotten his first sexual experiences from enslaved women. And I don't know of what age, but most likely older than himself. This is one of those secrets. Now I've found in one part of what's called his memorandum books, which in which he lists where he goes on any given day and how many miles, what expenditures paid 15 shillings for a haircut, bought so many bushels of something, gave a tip to the groom who took care of his horse, and all of these things in there. He has a secret, it's called the tachygraphical Alphabet that goes back to the 17th century. And it was a way of writing so that, like a shorthand. But here he is using it, this secret hand, to write down the names of a couple of women. And one of them is the wife of a distant neighbor. So he's traveling as a young lawyer and comes upon this guy who actually the husband is a guy who provides bricks, sells bricks, and Jefferson purchases from him, but he just writes down the name of the wife without any further comment. And I'm reading that as he's not the only person of the colonial elites to record the names of his sexual conquests. So there's another one in this secret language that is the name of someone. It sounds like the name given to an enslaved woman. So he's visiting a different plantation, probably for either legal matters or just stopping to say hello to the master of the plantation. And there's an enslaved woman on that plantation, otherwise lost to history, whose name he writes down in his little memorandum book. There are a number of clues and cues to his sexual conduct even before he ostensibly takes up with Sally Hemings, who is, as I mentioned earlier, the half sister of his late wife. His wife, he called her patty, died in 1782. Jefferson was 39 years old. He didn't remain celibate for the rest of his life. In all likelihood, it seems hardly. There seems hardly any doubt anymore, he took as his concubine. That's the word that was used by Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings's son, Madison, James Madison Hemings, in an interview he gave to a newspaper in the early 1870s, near the end of his life, where he refers to Thomas Jefferson as his father and he refers to his mother as Jefferson's concubine. My father's concubine, which is a woman kept for sex, kept for the enjoyment. It's a patriarchal society. And her role was not in any way that of a lover, an equal, a partner. And any effort to romanticize that relationship, I think is flawed because. And granted, we know precious little about certainly when it comes to the emotion that subsisted between them. Presumably he was fond of her and she bore six children of his, according to Madison Hemings. And the only people that he emancipated at the end of his life, otherwise kept in bondage through their lives, were Hemingses, were the offspring of that union that on official union, they weren't given Jefferson's surname at the time. They were called natural children. So Sally Hemings maybe resembled his late wife. They were married for 10 years, he called them, 10 years of uncheckered happiness. But there's nothing to indicate that Sally Hemings, who lived at Monticello and dressed like the other servants, who was a seamstress, although she had ready access to his bedroom, it probably was an open secret. There's a. I read in the special collections at the University of Virginia Library the diary of John Hartwell Cocke, who was a member of, well, one of the rectors, one of those on the board of the University of Virginia, and knew Jefferson quite well, saw a lot of him in the decade, the last decade of Jefferson's life. And he wrote in his diary he was a religious man, and he thought that Jefferson left a moral stain behind him in that he took as his mistress his concubine, the enslaved Sally Hemings. So James Madison kept all of Jefferson's secrets James Madison, incidentally, whom we typically think of just in a cerebral way, had a delightful sense of humor, was a great communicator one on one. And like Jefferson, was a good storyteller at the dinner table. He grew up as the eldest son on a plantation, as Jefferson did. And if you don't think that he had sex with, with enslaved girls, women on his plantation, then he would have been a 41 year old virgin when he married Dolly Todd. Dolly Madison 41 so the, the emphasis I place on these sexual relationships is that people who are of the landed elite, particularly in the south, where they live miles apart from the nearest neighbor, they make their own laws, they satisfy themselves, their urges, their appetites, and it's kind of expected that their fellows will maintain their secrets. So just because we don't have certain evidence of things, the culture becomes clearer. That it's class identity that gives someone like Jefferson the ability to rationalize that. And in fact, the medical theorists of the time, and I've read the medical texts that he has read, the medical theories of the time, said that for a generally sedentary man of letters, you should have regular sex with a healthy, fruitful female. They weren't interested. I mean, women were considered by and large as breeders, as nature's vessels to produce and morally instruct the next generation.
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B
That actually that's a part of your book that for me was especially enlightening how the theme that exists in it of Jefferson as the planter. And it's something that Jefferson is the member of that Virginia aristocracy. And it really comes to the fore when you're talking early about the efforts he puts into Monticello. It's a theme that informs his, that you can see in his approach to politics as you develop it. And I thought it was fascinating about how that you see it later in his career as well, when he's trying to forge a connection with Washington. And this gets to this other aspect of him as the politician that you talk about. He is a person who, and this comes across very well when you develop the discussion, the years in France where he is really detached in so many ways from a lot of these developments that are happening. And he comes back and he is trying to make a connection with Washington that he hopes will somehow surmount the very extensive connection that Washington has with Hamilton. And you point out he keeps defaulting back to that, that element of being the planter. He does the things that planters do, which is they'll be talking about their politics or maybe even their sexual conquests. But Then there always will be that section about how the crops are doing and what's working and what the weather is like. And that is such an important part of Jefferson's identity in a way that we find it not as easy to deal with because of that association with slavery, with his treatment of the enslaved people on his property, on his plantation. And yet, as you point out, it's something that's infused in his concept of himself.
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C
Well, yeah, he describes himself as a farmer. Washington describes himself as a farmer. Washington was an astute businessman. Jefferson looked to Washington for. They discussed. They belonged to the same agricultural societies. Jefferson was the president of the American Philosophical Society, which was a clearinghouse of all kinds of scientific information, a lot of it dealing with agriculture. And for all of these people like Washington, Jefferson land matters defined a gentleman's status or elite status. So the health of their rural landscape was something that consumed Jefferson. And he felt comfortable talking with the astute Washington. Washington was probably. He wasn't very well read. I mean, he wasn't poorly read, but he was mostly interested in the business of land management and in acquiring or speculating on land. Jefferson less so. But Jefferson was about exchanging seeds with people around the world, which he did literally looking at how someone else maintained their garden, whether it was in France or England or Pennsylvania. And he delighted in the rural landscape. He found ways to get closer to people by talking about this and science more generally, but especially agriculture. It was the only way that someone like Jefferson had any chance of getting out of debt. Well, he didn't succeed. And he was something of a spendthrift. He loved his wine, and he spent a good portion of his presidential salary on entertainment. It wasn't reimbursed back then. And Washington, on the other hand, got a head start on everyone. And he bought up some of the best land available in late colonial America, was a hard negotiator when it came to those who leased land from him. He wanted to get paid, and he made sure he did. I think that. What Jefferson was unable to do, he would try to come back to the conversation about the healthy air of Monticello, this kind of worship of nature, even when his relationship with Washington was souring in the 1790s and Washington went to his grave detesting Jefferson, thinking that Hamilton is right and Jefferson had sought to undermine the Washington administration from within, that he was dishonest. So Jefferson, in that final push after Washington's presidency to recover the relationship they had previously, he would always begin and end a letter to the retired first president by Comparing what was going on on the plantation and using that as his way of attempting to seduce Washington into recalling what they once had. But it didn't work. And Jefferson was deeply frustrated that Washington was solidly in the camp of the Federalists who would go on to criticize every step Jefferson took in his presidency. And equally to, I mean, the fight for the respect of the next generation was a battle that Jefferson ultimately won. And by the time of the Civil War, both North and south embraced the legacy of Thomas Jefferson. But he spent his retirement years seeking a biographer to come to Monticello to look at his beautifully organized notes, every scrap of paper from his political life, and to tell his story in the way that put forward the Revolution of 1800 script and had Jefferson as the savior of the republic. He never found that biographer in life, but after he died, starting with his, his grandson and namesake, he succeeded in spades.
- [44:17]
B
That actually was one of my favorite parts of your book. Not just how he's consciously preparing for, he's thinking about posterity. He's positioning himself for posterity in various ways. My absolute favorite part of that was how he is also determined to push back against John Marshall's, you know, counterblast, if you will, in his biography of George Washington, which Marshall gives us Washington, the arch Federalist. And Jefferson not only is looking for a biographer to tell his message, he's also trying to find someone to write a biography of Washington that pushes back against Marshall's message. He's not conceding anything. He's won, as you point out, he succeeds in, in establishing the Virginia dynasty, even if it means kneecapping his own vice president, Aaron Burr. And yet it's not enough simply to have that. He has to make sure that the Federalist message is. The Federalist vision is crushed utterly. And I had not really read until this point just how much attention he gave that, how much devotion he gave that in his retirement.
- [45:39]
C
Yeah, he used words for Marshall. And Marshall was multi volume Washington biography. You know, the Washington family left the complete papers that they'd collected of Washington after He died in 1799 to Marshall, who became chief justice just literally on the eve of Jefferson's inauguration as president and over the course of Jefferson's presidency volume, you know, the several volumes come out one at a time and it's the final volume that is the one that sinks, is designed to sink Jefferson's reputation. And he'll never let go of this. I mean, everyone who knows who's in Jefferson's circle knows how his distant cousin John Marshall is able to. Well, here's a perfect example. After Jefferson's death, one of his grandsons says to another of his grandsons, hey, I just found out that when we had to sell everything from Monticello because Jefferson died in great debt, $100,000 in debt, which is something like 4 million today. So one of the grandsons, it's Benjamin Franklin Randolph tells the eldest grandson, Thomas Jefferson Randolph, hey, Jefferson's set of Marshall's Washington biography was sold to someone who might use it to expose the marginalia and make Jefferson look even worse. So they conspired. Well, let's see how we can go buy it back or at least persuade the owner not to let anybody see it. Because if Jefferson's marginalia were to was to be made public, his enemies would go to the newspapers and rant. So his life is over and he's got this protective family recognizing just how critical reestablishing the Jefferson narrative is while Marshall is still alive. Marshall outlives Jefferson by six years and he's Chief justice and a very activist Chief justice on the Supreme Court until 1832. So yeah, it's part of the story of how Jefferson's attention was captured both by constructing a common man's sort of liberal, open minded Persona, that he would be seen as the first man of the people in American history. More than Washington. Washington loomed above. Jefferson was a man of the people. And yet he's someone who cultivated enemies, who doubled down and sought younger man political acolytes to go and ruin the reputations of these other people so that Jefferson didn't get caught trying to do it himself. He's constantly in politics using younger men, especially southerners, those he trusted to tell his story and to undermine those who were, whether it was lampooning him over a policy or lampooning him over his relationship with an enslaved woman. All of these things. I mean, had Jefferson known that his reputation today would be low because of his scientific racism, his belief that white is superior over black. If he knew that, he would have very carefully rewritten his determinative texts about African Americans and made himself appear as someone who deeply regretted and felt the humanity of the enslaved and hurt thinking about his own inability to be anything more than a paper abolitionist. I mean, he never actually lifted his finger to do anything. And he would have found a way to anticipate future generations and done all he could to seduce them into seeing him as a thoughtful, caring, something other than racist man.
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B
We appreciate the time you've taken to speak with us but before we go, could you tell us what you're working on now?
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C
Right now I'm planning to enjoy my retirement and if I do another book about US history, it will be another co authored book. My partner, my wife, Nancy Eisenberg and I wrote Madison and Jefferson together, which is the story of a 50 year long friendship and political friendship. And the last book we did together was the Problem of Democracy, which is the story of the President's Adams number two, number six, John Adams, John Quincy Adams. And that was a lot of fun and I enjoy writing with Nancy. So if there is going to be something else down the pike, it will be a co authored book.
- [52:06]
B
I really hope there is because I mean you have so many fascinating things to say about Jefferson as contemporaries. I mean we really in so many ways just scratched the surface of the book. And thank you for taking some time out of your schedule to speak with us about this very rich study of Thomas Jefferson.
- [52:25]
C
Well, I appreciate your reaching out to me, Mark, and I hope we get to cross paths again, as do I.
- [52:33]
B
Have a wonderful day.