Being Thomas Jefferson
An Intimate History
By Andrew Burstein
Category: History | Reading Duration: 24 min
About the Book
Being Thomas Jefferson (2026) digs into the life and times of a Founding Father who is both celebrated and lamented. It holds a light to the man whose eloquence helped establish American independence and orchestrate a new democratic government, but it also exposes his shortcomings and contradictions to try to paint a fuller picture of this iconic man.
Who Should Read This?
- History buffs curious about early America
- Fans of narrative biographies
- People interested in the psychology of a Founding Father
What’s in it for me? A portrait of a Founding Father that doesn’t shy away from messy details.
It might seem a little late in the game to be asking who Thomas Jefferson was. And yet, for a Founding Father who left behind a library full of letters and other writing, it remains a question that lacks any easy answers. Putting aside the monuments and mottos, this Blink tries to home in on a mind at work, to figure out how a man could call himself a “son of nature” and also move comfortably in the intellectual salons of Paris. As we’ll see, Jefferson was a man of severe contradictions, which is why he’s continued to fascinate researchers and historians.
He was, after all, the man who penned America’s most enduring statement on human equality, and yet also owned hundreds of enslaved people and failed to rise to the occasion when the call for abolition was ringing all around him. And then there’s his romantic life. … Yes, we’ll get into that. Here’s a classic cradle-to-the-grave Blink on one of America’s most enigmatic Founding Fathers.
Chapter 1: A surveyor’s son
One of the first things to know about Thomas Jefferson is that he was, for better and worse, the grand architect and designer of his life. And the decisions he made can tell us a lot. For example, at Monticello, the beloved home he built for himself in the picturesque plateaus outside of Charlottesville, Virginia, Jefferson carefully planned a burial ground. His boyhood friend, Dabney Carr, died young.
But he mattered so deeply that Jefferson had Carr’s coffin hauled up the mountain and reburied at Monticello, making him the first person laid to rest on the site. In fact, Carr’s plot lies closer to Jefferson’s plot than that of his own mother. His father, Peter Jefferson, isn’t even there. He stayed buried at his own plantation in Shadwell, which caught fire, was abandoned, and eventually faded from memory along with the location of his grave. Shadwell, Virginia is where Thomas Jefferson was born, in 1743, and it played a big role in shaping who he became. His impulse for control grew out of his family’s plantation and the sprawling frontier landscape of Albemarle County itself.
There were the everyday reality and orderly rules of enslaved labor. Plus, his father was a surveyor; one day, his father literally sent Thomas alone into the woods with a gun to learn how to survive. Self-reliance was expected. When Thomas was fourteen years old, his father died, but more valued father figures came shortly afterward, when Jefferson headed to Williamsburg to attend the College of William and Mary.
He received important mentorship from William Small, who taught mathematics and ethics, and George Wythe, Virginia’s most admired legal scholar. Jefferson didn’t have the theatrical flair that some of his classmates possessed, but he did have the discipline to study harder than others and resist the temptation of drinking and gambling. Jefferson’s power was in reading, precision, and prose. And yet, as we’ll see in the sections ahead, beneath that outward discipline, his inner life was a far less rational place – one into which contradictions and self-sabotage could creep.
Chapter 2: Climbing the ladder to Monticello
After graduating from college, Thomas Jefferson started his own law practice in 1767. But once on his own, it was clear from his notebooks and correspondence that a conflict was starting to take shape between his private and public lives. He began to fret about his love life as his other friends began marrying. His journals at the time were filled with cryptic codes that defy easy explanation.
He even made a reckless advance toward the wife of a close friend, a betrayal that resulted in public humiliation when it later surfaced. A pattern was forming: Jefferson would present himself as a paragon of morality, while his private life would be home to secrecy and contradictions. Whenever cracks in his carefully crafted public persona would emerge, he’d retreat – to Albemarle, to books, to spaces he could control. The ultimate retreat was Monticello. Its construction began not long before his marriage to Martha Wayles Skelton, known as Patty, in 1772. The couple first arrived at the home, which was more like a worksite, after pushing through snow and darkness.
The newlyweds drank wine and played music, Jefferson on his violin, Martha on the harpsichord that her husband had ordered from England. But the daily reality at Monticello was mud, hauling, leveling, and relentless labor from enslaved workers – many of whom Jefferson had inherited from his father’s estate. They’re the ones who cleared the summit, carved roads, burned lime for mortar, and made Jefferson’s vision possible. His desire for order was baked into Monticello, with the natural landscape reshaped into sequential, circular, roundabout paths. But there were complications early on, in 1773, when Patty’s father John Wayles died. The Jeffersons inherited vast landholdings, more enslaved workers, and … a staggering amount of debt.
Among the newly arrived workers was an infant, Sally Hemings, who was fathered by John Wayles, making her Patty’s half-sister. Sally’s presence would cast a long shadow in the years to come. All of this was happening at a tumultuous time. A revolution was afoot, one that called upon educated people from respected families like Jefferson’s to help free the colonies from the grip of the British monarchy.
Chapter 3: Making a case for independence
Jefferson’s revolutionary years really kicked off in 1774. More than anything else, this had to do with his writing. His political pamphlet, called A Summary View of the Rights of British America, was quite the sensation. It was printed, circulated throughout the colonies, and even made its way to London.
No one could deny that Jefferson had a talent with the quill. His prose had a special way of identifying America’s narrative momentum in history. He compared Americans to the Saxons of the past in order to argue that, like their forebears, they’d earned the right to govern themselves. It was the lawyer in him. He could cite a precedent and make a strong, convincing moral case. It was a talent that earned him a major role in drafting America’s Declaration of Independence.
By 1776, Jefferson was a national name, moving between congressional meetings and eventually beginning to draft the Declaration of Independence. This was the moment when Jefferson’s emotional language really became a political weapon. He took everything he’d learned from his college mentors, including the philosophical ideas of John Locke and Scottish thinkers like Adam Smith, to put forth a moral argument calling for consent of the governed. Jefferson framed separation from Britain as a rupture between intimate partners, full of wounded attachment. He laid the accusations out, one after the other. He was also convincing when he spoke of the importance of religious freedom and public education.
He held firm beliefs in his skepticism toward organized religion and its tendency to strive for influential power. He was a major advocate for the separation of church and state, and saw the potential to build a nation with an educated public capable of making informed decisions about their own future. And yet, his letters show that Jefferson wasn’t exactly eager to step away from his law practice and into the realm of politics. But friends and colleagues encouraged him, even though his political career did indeed get off to a very rocky start.
Elected to the Virginia governorship in 1779, Jefferson inherited a crisis he was poorly suited to manage. With revolutionary battles still raging, all around him supply chains were failing, currency collapsing, and defenses exposed. The worst came in 1781; with fears of British troops breaking through, Jefferson grabbed his family and fled through the woods. Legislators were captured, and the claim that he ran away in cowardice followed him his entire life.
Chapter 4: Jefferson in Paris
There was an investigation into Jefferson’s actions as governor of Virginia during the war, and he was eventually cleared of any wrongdoing. But it continued to be a terrible time for the man as his wife Martha died in 1782 after a difficult pregnancy and delivery. Every pregnancy was difficult for Martha – four of their children died in infancy, and Lucy Jefferson, their last child, would die at the age of two. Only two of the children from this marriage would make it to adulthood: Martha, better known as Patsy, born in 1772, and Mary, born in 1778.
Patsy remained close to him during an extended period of grieving, and she accompanied him in 1784 when he travelled to Paris for a five-year stint as a minister, securing treaties and diplomatic agreements in Europe. France was an opportunity for escape and reinvention. Thomas and Patsy arrived in 1784, and Jefferson was soon basking in admiration, beauty, and refinement – the kind of things that made him feel alive. Perhaps surprisingly, he also sparked an intense but brief romance with an artist, Maria Cosway, who appears to have been equally charmed by the American ambassador despite being married at the time. The relationship with Cosway inspired one of Jefferson’s more remarkable pieces of writing, known as the Head and Heart letter – a swooning letter in which his romantic and logical sides collided and he admitted that pain was a worthy price to pay to feel the joy he experienced with Cosway in Paris. But it wasn’t all romance.
Jefferson also frequented salons and spent time with some of the great intellectual minds of the day, like the Marquis de Condorcet. His friendship with Condorcet is especially revealing, since they agreed on a great many liberal, democratic ideals, but could not see eye to eye when it came to issues of race. Slavery would continue to hang over Jefferson’s life and legacy. Before he left Paris, he was joined by his younger daughter Mary, who was being looked after by Sally Hemings. It could not have been lost on Jefferson that when Hemings set foot in France, she was legally a free person. But it was at this point that Jefferson began a sexual relationship with her, one that can only be considered a frightfully imbalanced relationship, even if it wasn’t an uncommon one among American slave owners at the time.
Chapter 5: American politics: messy and partisan from the start
A good deal of Jefferson’s post-Paris career in American politics can be defined by his rivalry with Alexander Hamilton. Hamilton was the head of the Federalist Party and Jefferson was seen as one of the leaders of the Republicans, and these two political parties were only getting more savage with one another, with the stakes piling higher. For all of his faith in logic and reason, Jefferson was not above feeling contempt and carrying powerful grudges toward people. And few were as despised in his eyes as Hamilton, a man he saw as so corrosive that he threatened to infect the republic itself.
This was a feeling that really hardened once Jefferson joined George Washington’s cabinet as Secretary of State, with Hamilton serving as Secretary of the Treasury. When it came to the issue of creating a national bank, Hamilton shrewdly outmaneuvered him – cultivating congressional loyalty, shaping policy, and, most painful of all, winning Washington’s trust. When Jefferson was publicly exposed for having privately called the Vice President John Adams a monarchist sympathizer, Hamilton cheerfully helped spread the story. The humiliation sealed Jefferson’s conviction that Hamilton operated through intrigue, and that compromise now endangered the republic. The distaste Jefferson experienced as part of Washington’s cabinet led him to resign in early 1794. But it got worse before it got better.
A private letter to an Italian diplomat was translated, leaked, and printed. In it, Jefferson’s typically hyperbolic prose suggested that American leaders had been corrupted by British influence. He didn’t name George Washington, but the insinuation was obvious, and the rift between them made permanent. But in a way, this public embarrassment lured Jefferson back into the game. Looking to repair his reputation and fend off the Federalists, he ran for the presidency in 1796 and 1800. In the first election, he came in second to John Adams – which, at the time, meant you were given the role of vice president.
In 1800, the election ended in a suspenseful tie with Aaron Burr. The decision was put to Congress, which at the time had a Federalist majority led by … that’s right, Alexander Hamilton. It turned out that Hamilton hated Aaron Burr even more than he did Jefferson. Burr was, after all, the man who would end up killing Hamilton in a duel. So, ironically enough, Hamilton tilted the scales of Congress in Jefferson’s favor, with Burr relegated to vice president.
Chapter 6: The highs and lows of a presidency
Thomas Jefferson really did think of himself as a savior – the one man who could heal and protect the nation. And on March 4, 1801, he delivered his inaugural address. Standing in the unfinished Capitol building, he presented the republic as healthy, reconciled, and morally sound. In his eyes, this was the Revolution of 1800.
Elections work. Laws bound everyone. Federalists and Republicans alike could share the same democratic faith. Agriculture, not urban luxury or financial speculation, would keep the nation virtuous. The address was like a benediction, an offering to heal the political illness brought on by the toxic partisan divide. But beneath the public triumph was a private contradiction that Jefferson never resolved.
At Monticello, Sally Hemings began to give birth to his children. He granted them an education and eventual freedom, but treated them as unequal to the children he’d had with his wife. In fact, his writing on race grew more rigid, as he tried to dismiss all the evidence that was piling up against him. While he continued to extol the virtue of liberty for Americans and prop himself up as a man of great character, that virtue was lacking in his private life. Inside the President’s House (before it was known as the White House), Jefferson presented himself as a simple man, hosting dinners in worn clothes and slippers. At the same time, he designed the President’s House in the style of French salons.
And for all his gestures toward unification, he sidelined the Federalists, rewarded his allies, and continued his secretive ways. When Napoleon Bonaparte unexpectedly offered all of Louisiana for sale, Jefferson quickly approved the purchase before Congress could weigh in. Whether or not this move was constitutional on Jefferson’s part was debated, but the sudden reality was that the nation instantly doubled its size. Jefferson played a significant part in shaping the narrative of America’s westward expansion. And despite his familiarity with the Indigenous people, who were sometimes invited into the house on his father’s plantation, Jefferson explicitly put their interests aside in favor of that narrative. Jefferson wrote that had an “affectionate attachment” to Native Americans, but his determined strategy was to push Native peoples off any land that white settlers wanted.
US expansion carried so much moral certainty for Jefferson that it made room for deliberate cruelty. Following his reelection in 1804, the second inaugural address took on a different tone. The warmth was gone, and he seemed resigned to the nation’s political fractures. Jefferson didn’t exactly end his presidency on a high note. Britain ran roughshod over American ships in the Atlantic, and his response of an embargo only hurt farmers and merchants at home. And at Monticello, grief returned with the death of his daughter Mary.
His public composure was barely hanging in there as his optimism faded. He was still powerful and disciplined, convinced of America’s promise, yet less certain about what could keep the republic whole. In the summer of 1826, Thomas Jefferson was living out his dying days at Monticello.
Chapter 7: A fitting finale for a complicated legend
The mood was dire. Creditors were circling like vultures, and his family was bracing for ruin. Jefferson’s devoted daughter Martha was by his side, exhausted and saddened. The mountain estate that once felt like a kingdom was now fragile.
In his final years, Jefferson had retreated into nature and reflection. He gardened, tinkered with inventions, studied fossils, birds, weather, and language. He called himself a rational Christian. He didn’t believe in miracles. But he wondered about the soul and the afterlife. In his last days, Monticello had become the perfect metaphor for his life – part aspiration and design, part decay.
His final effort was in founding the University of Virginia, imagining an “academical village” that would educate and prepare citizens for his continued dream of a self-governing republic. This, the Declaration, and America’s religious freedom were the things he wanted to be remembered for. Jefferson died on July 4, 1826, the fiftieth anniversary of American independence. It was the same day that his friend and rival John Adams died. Even at the end, Jefferson was working to control the narrative. In retirement, he organized the Anas, his private notes on the Washington administration, meant to counter Federalist versions of events and reclaim Washington – and himself – for the republican cause.
History, Jefferson believed, could be guided, corrected, and rescued from hostile hands. That effort worked remarkably well. Later biographers, aided by his family, polished Jefferson into a sentimental icon: tender father, benevolent patriarch, enlightened statesman. They defended him against charges of being anti-religious, softened his politics, and minimized the brutal realities of slavery. Jefferson became a symbol of harmony and affection, a man supposedly governed by restraint and reason. Yet the silent and invisible world of Sally Hemings resists that image.
Despite giving birth to at least four of his children, she left no written words of her own. Her consent, affection, and coercion remain a mystery. Jefferson condemned slavery in theory, profited from it in practice, freed some of his enslaved children, and left many others to be sold after his death. In the end, his only vision of emancipation also involved forced deportation. So we are still faced with a Jefferson of deep contradictions. He shaped American political language, curated his own memory, loved beauty, feared dishonor, sought control, and found solace in nature.
His legacy can be both inspiring and troubling – a mix of suspicions and certainties, rumors and realities. Even his death was a contradiction. Here was a rational man who questioned faith and wasted no time on the mystical world. But when he died on that Fourth of July, the nation saw a cosmic meaning at play – one so poetic that even he might have appreciated it. In this Blink to Being Thomas Jefferson by Andrew Burstein, you’ve learned that Thomas Jefferson can be better understood by holding his inner life and public career together.
Final summary
Rather than choosing to either admire or admonish, we can appreciate that Jefferson was both a visionary thinker with extraordinary faith in language, reason, and human progress, and defensive, driven by a need to control how he was seen, and incapable of overcoming racial prejudice. His habits of retreat and engagement, charm and resentment, harmony and combat shaped not only his relationships but his politics, pushing him toward behind-the-scenes influence, moral certainty, and a lifelong effort to curate his own legacy.
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About the Author
Andrew Burstein is a retired American historian and the Charles P. Manship Professor Emeritus of History at Louisiana State University. As a noted expert on the key figures in early American politics and culture, he has written numerous books including Jefferson’s Secrets and The Passions of Andrew Jackson. He also served as a consultant on Ken Burns’s PBS documentary on Thomas Jefferson.