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T homas Jefferson, according to richard hofstadter, was “the aristocrat as democrat,” while tom Paine was the “democrat as democrat.” the two shared democratic values but came from quite different backgrounds and behaved quite differently. they liked each other but simply didn’t move in the same circles. John adams disagreed with Jefferson on many issues, but held him in real respect, and he loathed Paine. For adams, Paine was “a mongrel between pig and puppy, begotten by a wild boar on a bitch wolfe,” and his popular and influential Common Sense, a “poor, ignorant, malicious, short-sighted, crapulous mass.” it is not known whether adams had heard the rumors about Jefferson’s supposed affair with sally hemings, his slave. in her book on Jefferson, Fawn M. Brodie insists the affair brought both of them a secret happiness for thirty-eight years. though dumas Malone, Jefferson expert, denied there was any such affair, it has become politically correct to accept Brodie’s view. H H H Fawn M. Brodie’s “intimate history” of thomas Jefferson is likely to be the most controversial book of the year, at least among people interested in american history. Garry Wills has blasted it in the New York Review (april 18, 1974) for finding sexual significance in trivial passages in Jefferson’s writings, and dumas Malone (the fifth volume of whose definitive biography of Jefferson has just appeared) recently released to the New York Times a previously unpublished letter (which Professor Brodie had seen but was permitted to quote only in part) written by Thomas Jefferson and Tom Paine: Aristocrat and Democrat CHAPTER 14 136 Thomas Jefferson and Tom Paine: Aristocrat and Democrat 137 Ellen randolph coolidge, Jefferson’s granddaughter, on october 24, 1858, in which she vigorously denied one of the major points Brodie makes in her biography: that Jefferson had a slave mistress for many years. Brodie undoubtedly overpsychologizes and occasionally she reads too much between lines and forgets that sometimes, with people, there is less (rather than more) there than meets the eye. still, her accomplishments are considerable all the same. she has loosened up our thinking about the third president and breathed life and spirit into a man who has for many people seemed cold, aloof, elusive, and impenetrable. her success in making Jefferson a warm and interesting figure rests largely on her readiness to discuss frankly and in depth his racial views, his sex life, and his emotional involvements with other people. she makes no secret of what she is up to, and we are free to accept or reject the interpretations which she places on the evidence which she presents for all to see. Brodie’s Jefferson is both a racist (like most whites of his day) and an emancipationist (unlike most southern whites in the first part of the nineteenth century). as a monogenist, he thought blacks deserved the rights belonging to all humans which he wrote into the declaration of independence, and he sponsored measures for facilitating the emancipation of slaves in Virginia, for banning slavery in the West, and for ending the atlantic slave trade. in 1770 he undertook the defense of a Virginia mulatto who was seeking freedom and argued that “under the law of nature, all men are born free, and every one comes into the world with a right to his own person, which includes the liberty of moving and using it at his own will.” (he lost the case.) at the same time, however, he favored colonizing free blacks and had serious doubts about the intellectual capacities of black people. somewhat like William shockley today, he thought blacks were inferior to whites in reason and imagination though equal to whites in memory. When Benjamin Banneker, negro mathematician, sent him a copy of his almanac to show him what blacks could do, Jefferson assured him of his eagerness to accumulate evidence of black talent, but to a friend afterward he belittled Banneker’s work. still, it is impossible to put Jefferson’s views on race into any neat little categories. he seesawed back and forth on the issue all his life, and though he became increasingly conservative with age, he seems never to have abandoned either his deep-seated faith in the right of people of all races to freedom and self-determination, or his conviction that the blacks both deserved and were destined to be free. his reluctance to free many of his own slaves during his lifetime may have grown out...

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