Fawn M. Brodie - Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History

Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History

Thomas Jefferson was a natural subject for Brodie's fourth biography. One of her courses focused on America from 1800 to 1830, and her seminar in political biography could serve as an appropriate forum for a work-in-progress. Throughout this period, Brodie was attracted to Mormon studies and was importuned by several publishers to write a biography of Brigham Young. The LDS entrepreneur, O.C. Tanner (1904–1993), offered Brodie $10,000 in advance to produce a manuscript. Dale Morgan told Brodie that Madeline Reeder McQuown, his closer friend, had nearly completed a huge manuscript on Young. At the time, McQuown’s biography was little more than rough drafts of a few early chapters, but Brodie was dissuaded and abandoned Brigham Young for Thomas Jefferson.

By May 1968, Brodie was committed to writing the biography. She understood that it could not be a full account. The study of Jefferson had become a virtual career for several living historians. For instance, Dumas Malone was in the process of completing a six-volume biography of Jefferson, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1975. Brodie decided to concentrate on a biography of “the private man.” She decided to build on several recently published articles on the historical controversy related to a reported sexual relationship between Jefferson and Sally Hemings, a quadroon slave said to be the half-sister of his late wife. The topic was timely during a period of increased national interest in race, sex, and presidential hypocrisy. Brodie had personal reasons as well, having discovered that her husband had been conducting an extramarital affair.

To Brodie, Jefferson’s ambiguous posturings on slavery could be explained by his personal life. If he were conducting a 28-year affair with a slave, then he could not free his slaves because once freed, Virginia law would force them from the state. He could only continue his liaison with Hemings if his slaves remained slaves. Because of the paucity of evidence, two of the most prominent Jefferson biographers of the twentieth century, Dumas Malone and Merrill Peterson, had relied on Jefferson family testimony naming his nephews as fathers, and discounted other evidence about this sexual relationship, first reported in 1802 by the journalist James T. Callender when Jefferson was President, after he failed to win an appointment by the president.

Working from Winthrop Jordan's Black on White (1968), Brodie also used Dumas Malone's documentation of Jefferson's activities to correlate his residencies at Monticello with the conception period of each of Sally Hemings' children, whose births he recorded in the Farm Book. She discovered that Hemings never conceived when Jefferson was not at Monticello, during years when he was often away for months at a time.