Thomas Jefferson Forgetting the Ladies

Thomas Jefferson's racism, his slave holding, his exploitation of Sally Hemings still give us pain. Renewing the ache of those familiar wounds is Gary Nash and Graham Russell Gao Hodges' recent revelation that Jefferson welched on a promise he made to the Polish patriot, Tadeusz Kosciuszko to free his slaves although Kosciuszko set aside considerable money to reimburse Jefferson for their "value."¹ And Jon Kukla's Mr. Jefferson's Women, a narrative and critique of the founding father's relationships with some of the important women in his life, makes us wish yet again that he had behaved better. Do we ask too much of him? Is the fault in the questions we pose, or his violation of the ideals he articulated so unforgettably?

The questions historians pose of the author of the Declaration of Independence naturally come from a desire to understand Jefferson and his time but they almost inevitably come as well from our anguish as citizens over the defects in the democracy whose birth Jefferson attended. These overlapping and over-determined purposes transmit a sense of urgency and drama to work on Jefferson, but also mean that much rides on his weaknesses.

Kukla, noticing the inadequacy of the personal and presentist responses of historians to the initial confirmation of Jefferson's affair with Sally Hemings, set about to provide a historicized view of the founder's relationships with women. The result is a telling collection of Jefferson's encounters with a number of women. (As Kukla's title hints, this book is about Mr. Jefferson, not his women. His portraits of Rebecca Burwell, Martha Wayles Skelton Jefferson, Maria Cosway, Sally Hemings, and others are sensitive to the sexism of Jefferson and the period, but the sketches are in service of Kukla's investigation of Jefferson and not to give us new views of these women.) Jon Kukla demonstrates that Jefferson was a selfish suitor, father, and husband in private and was cold to progressive dreams about the possibilities for women in political life. Kukla's tight focus on women and gender provides a story that is readable and thought provoking about Jefferson's relations with women as well as with men. He misses some opportunities to provide the context to broaden our understanding of white women's experience in the southern family and of enlightenment thinking about women and the family, which would serve to temper our disappointment with Jefferson. He also fails to follow some trails that might reach deeper into the personal Jefferson, potentially revealing even more about the political Jefferson. But this work helps us grasp something important about the elusive Jefferson.

Kukla begins his story with Jefferson's youthful infatuation with Rebecca Burwell. Burwell turned down this anxious young man's halting offer of marriage and chose for a husband the more ardent and direct Jacquelin Ambler. Jefferson already battered by fear, self-consciousness, and ambivalence acquired, in the wake of Burwell's turndown, crippling headaches that would, for many years to come, afflict him in times of stress. Kukla marks Burwell's rejection as an important turning point in Jefferson's life and behavior, arguing that it "fuelled the misogyny of Jefferson's twenties and aroused a more predatory attitude toward women that ended in a series of unwelcome advances toward a married neighbor" (p. 17).

Unresolved in this tale of initiation is the question of the origins of Jefferson's unhappiness. Kenneth Lockridge and Douglas Wilson who have studied Jefferson's Literary Commonplace book, a collection of excerpts from writers that includes an early period of virulent woman-hating quotations, both date the young Jefferson's deepest period of misogyny to the years before 1762, two years before Rebecca Burwell rejected him. Lockridge argues that the period corresponds roughly to the years between the death of his father and Jefferson's attaining his majority. And he concludes, as others have, that Jefferson's antagonist in these pages must be his widowed mother.² Kukla doesn't...