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On the bicentennial of his re-election as President, Jefferson still intrigues Americans for another reason: his tantalizing inner complexity. The tall, soft-spoken Virginia squire who loved fine wines and whose enormous book collection became the core of the Library of Congress was no unfeeling, detached egghead but a passionate, somewhat elusive human being. When his wife Martha died in 1782, he wrapped a lock of her hair with a scrap of paper containing an excerpt from the couple's favorite novel, Laurence Sterne's comic masterpiece, Tristram Shandy, and stashed the token in his desk. Four years later, while serving in Paris as Minister to France, he fell in love with a married painter, Maria Cosway. The relationship didn't last, but before it ended, Jefferson wrote Cosway the longest letter of his life, a fanciful, romantic conversation between his "Heart" and his "Head."
Jefferson's soul was in conflict all his life. Nearly everything he wrote was contradicted at some point by something he did. The prophet of equality owned slaves and, it now seems likely, had at least one child with one of them. The man who said, "Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate for a moment to prefer the latter," privately urged state officials to press seditious libel charges against editors unfriendly to his presidency. The advocate of a limited Federal Government and opponent of a permanent standing military doubled the size of the country in one stroke by making the Louisiana Purchase and went to war against Muslim pirates with a brand-new fighting force: the U.S. Marines. "He had outsized talents of statesmanship and outsized talents for self-indulgence," says Roger Wilkins, author of Jefferson's Pillow: The Founding Fathers and the Dilemma of Black Patriotism. "I don't begrudge Jefferson his iconic status, because he was, in fact, a great, if flawed human being."
But inconsistency is not hypocrisy. If Jefferson's actions sometimes violated his high and, at times, unrealistic principles, our present-day actions violate some of them too. There isn't much about today's America that its visionary third President wouldn't find troubling, in need of improvement or just plain horrifying. The peaceful republic that Jefferson wished for and did what he could to usher into being--a collection of independent gentleman farmers, moderately prosperous and highly educated, living under a thrifty, modest government that was legally bound not to meddle in their affairs, be they commercial, domestic or religious, and which staunchly resisted foreign "entanglements"--seems now like a large-scale version of Monticello, the grand but quixotic hilltop sanctuary that Jefferson never quite finished building and couldn't afford to pass down to his heirs.