Sex, Science, and Sensibility at Jefferson's Monticello

Abstract

Andrew Burstein. Jefferson's Secrets: Death and Desire at Monticello. New York: Basic Books, 2005. vii + 343 pp. Illustrations and index. $25.00. Thomas Jefferson was one of the most well-traveled and well-read Americans of his generation. While many of his contemporaries seldom strayed beyond their home counties, this Virginian resided in Williamsburg, Philadelphia, Richmond, New York, Washington, and Paris—besides his native Albemarle County. He visited Boston, Italy, and London, the mountains of upstate New York and Virginia's Natural Bridge. Books on history, philosophy, manners, travel, natural history, and medicine—among other subjects—gave Jefferson access to the ideas of diverse thinkers from both classical and modern times. Travel and reading made him the quintessential Enlightenment man who looked optimistically to a future in which sentiment and sense would be enlisted in the cause of human progress. When Jefferson retired from public life in 1809, he stopped traveling but continued reading. The third president returned to Monticello, where he spent most of his remaining seventeen years before famously dying (as did his friend John Adams) on the fiftieth anniversary of American independence. During his retirement years, the once peripatetic Jefferson never left Virginia. He made summer trips to Poplar Forest, his house in Bedford County; twice he went to Richmond. At Monticello, Jefferson remained both physically and intellectually active. He rode his horse, Eagle; read prodigiously; and exchanged letters with leading intellectuals in Europe and America. Jefferson lived as a patriarch, surrounded by books, grandchildren, enslaved workers, and an unrelenting stream of mostly uninvited guests. Andrew Burstein attempts to recreate this relatively isolated world of family, books, and bondpeople in Jefferson's Secrets: Death and Desire at Monticello. In this book, Burstein continues the ongoing process of reinterpreting the third president as a man of sensibility and sentiment. An icon of the American Enlightenment, Jefferson traditionally has been portrayed as a philosopher, scientist, and statesman—one who, to use his own well-known dichotomy, favored his Head over his Heart. Burstein's first book, The Inner Jefferson, [End Page 333] contributed to a growing body of work by scholars seeking to rescue Jefferson and his enlightened contemporaries from hyper-rationalist caricature. In The Inner Jefferson, Burstein found in Jefferson's personal correspondence a moral sense and sympathetic sensibility which, he argued, "both preceded and continuously shaped" his political doctrines and outlook.1 Burstein revisits this theme in Jefferson's Secrets, asserting that the Enlightenment "was not so much preoccupied with the intellect, as it was influenced by an affective psychology" (p. 47). While Burstein previously located the source of that affective psychology in the works of Laurence Sterne and other sentimental writers, he now contends that this perspective was at least equally rooted in the medical discourse of the era. Along with his enlightened contemporaries, Jefferson read widely in medical literature, which Burstein contends supplied him with many of his guiding principles in both politics and life. Jefferson's "entire conception of America," he maintains, "was predicated on a philosophical purpose that mirrored the function of medical research: experiment leading to the mastery of nature, to health, to a better quality of life" (p. 43). The language of health and medicine—of sensations, nerves, and passions—shaped Jefferson's physical regimen, while additionally supplying the metaphors in his descriptions of and prescriptions for political and social life. That said, this book is about more than finding yet another source of Jefferson's political culture and ideology. In the wake of the release of DNA evidence in 1998, which made Jefferson's paternity of Sally Hemings's light-skinned children a near certainty, Burstein seeks to distance the master of Monticello from "the mounting prejudices of modern biographers" by launching "a more honest conversation about Jefferson, race, and sex than historians and others have engaged in of late" (pp. 3–4). Previously among the ranks of skeptics himself, Burstein is now convinced that Jefferson fathered Hemings...