THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, March 3, 1996 TAG: 9602290592
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY JAMES E. PERSON JR.
LENGTH: Medium: 87 lines
THE INNER JEFFERSON
Portrait of a Grieving Optimist
ANDREW BURSTEIN
University Press of Virginia. 334 pp. $35.
What sort of man was Thomas Jefferson? The noble face that graces Mount Rushmore seems to speak of a man who might be described as Viscount Garnet Wolseley described Robert E. Lee: ``a man who was cast in a grander mold and made of different and finer metal than all other men.''
Many Americans perceive Jefferson - founder of the University of Virginia, author of the Declaration of Independence and third president of the United States - as both a genius and a marble man. But was he?
As Andrew Burstein shows in The Inner Jefferson: Portrait of a Grieving Optimist, there was more to Jefferson than soaring thoughts and wise sayings. He was indeed a man of the Enlightenment. But while he embraced the spirit of the age, he was not married to it.
Burstein has examined Jefferson's letters and read widely in the most important books about the great Virginian, and from these he has pieced together a portrait of a man who was uneasily divided within himself. He was both a cool rationalist, comfortable in reading the most austere Enlightenment philosophers, and a widely read man who recognized - with John Locke, Sir Edward Coke and Lord Kames - that much of life is outside the realm of reason.
Burstein demonstrates how Jefferson found much to respect and admire in the sermons and fiction of Laurence Sterne, author of the classic novel Tristram Shandy. It was Sterne who affirmed Jefferson's not widely known belief that the quirky, the humorous, the tragic, the illogical and the emotional are all legitimate parts of life.
The need to love and be loved fall outside the expertise of the logic-chopper. But it was this recognition that enabled Jefferson to share in the optimistic view of life characteristic of the Enlightenment, an optimism that seldom exists outside the ivory tower, while enduring the sadness of life. He experienced deep grief after the deaths of his wife and youngest daughter, who were in the prime of their lives.
One of the great political minds of his age, Jefferson, at the end of his career, ``knew how to free himself from public duties, finally, but the age of science and reason would never discover a remedy for the disquieting persistence of pain and loss,'' Burstein writes. ``Jefferson was long convinced of this and remained tormented'' - a grieving optimist.
Much information about Jefferson is presented and clarified in this well-researched study, revealing Burstein's wide reading in Jeffersonia. The author makes short work of Fawn Brodie's silly Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History, which advanced in the 1970s the myth of Jefferson having sired children by one of his slaves, Sally Hemings. According to Burstein, the Sally Hemings story was originally concocted by one of Jefferson's political enemies, a disappointed patronage-seeker who drowned in the James River - a possible suicide - shortly thereafter.
Burstein makes excellent use of supportive material from the works of historians Virginius Dabney, Dumas Malone (author of the definitive Jefferson biography) and many others, and from Jefferson's erudite correspondence.
But contrary to Burstein's conclusion, the man revealed in the letters was no simon-pure liberal. The author's evidence actually portrays Jefferson as the sort of man described by historians Alf Mapp Jr. (whose important Thomas Jefferson: A Strange Case of Mistaken Identity is not acknowledged in this work) and Russell Kirk, who wrote that ``for all his acquaintance with the philosophes and his affection for France, Jefferson had Coke, Locke and Kames for his real political mentors; and, like them, he had half a mind to be a conservative - and sometimes more than half a mind for it.''
The man revealed in Burstein's worthwhile study is a fascinating and deep individual, yet a man recognizable in his strengths and weaknesses of character, and even lovable. Nevertheless, his mind might be likened to the Atlantic Ocean, and we who seek to understand it are mere children playing in the shallows. MEMO: James E. Person Jr., a native of Virginia who now lives in Michigan, is
the editor of ``The Unbought Grace of Life: Essays in Honor of Russell
Kirk.'' ILLUSTRATION: Painting
Thomas Jefferson
by CNB