Free America's Obsessives: The Compulsive Energy That Built a Nation by Joshua Kendall

this long-standing assumption seems much more plausible. The choice of Sally Hemings as a mistress is entirely consistent with Jefferson’s character disorder . For obsessives, in intimate relationships, as in everything else, control is the be-all and end-all; a genuine partnership with mutual give-and-take is anathema. In Sally, a woman thirty years his junior, whom he happened to own, Jefferson might well have found just what he was after. That was what Aaron Burr concluded, at least according to the late Gore Vidal. In his 1973 historical novel, Burr , the man who served as vice president during Jefferson’s first term describes the submissive Sally as “exactly what Jefferson wanted a wife to be.”
      
    By the time he entered the White House in 1801—he would be the first president to be inaugurated in Washington, D.C.—Jefferson had built a formidable résumé, which included considerable experience in foreign affairs. After returning from France in September 1789, he accepted President Washington’s request that he serve as secretary of state. He remained in the cabinet until his resignation in late 1793. By then, he was convinced that the president was being unduly influenced by the treasury secretary, Alexander Hamilton. According to Jefferson, Hamilton was an elitist bent on undoing the democratic reforms of the American Revolution. Eager to revive the “spirit of  ’76,” the die-hard antiauthoritarian founded an opposition party, the Republicans. In the presidential election of 1796, Jefferson unsuccessfully opposed John Adams, Washington’s successor as the leader of the Federalists. Since the vice presidency then went to whoever finished with the second most electoral votes, Jefferson had no choice but to serve in the administration of his bitter foe, whom, like Hamilton, he considered a crypto-monarchist. The hotly contested rematch, which took place between April and October 1800—each state chose its electors at a different time—didn’t end until the House of Representatives declared Jefferson the victor in its thirty-sixth ballot on February 17, 1801.
    Jefferson’s first inaugural address, delivered on March 4, has turned out to be one of the most momentous speeches in American history, even though few in the crowd of more than 1,100, which filled the Senate chamber in the semifinished capitol building, could make out its words. The sociophobe couldn’t project; his soft voice was inaudible to anyone not seated in the first few rows. Fortunately for Jefferson, in contrast to the Declaration, this text would immediately be pored over by newspaper readers across the nation. And it would be well worth the study. Laboring over every word—he cranked out three complete drafts in the two weeks allotted to him—the perfectionist had produced another masterpiece; this one inspired Americans not to break a bond with a foreign ruler, but to cement their bonds with one another. While Republicans called the end product “a Magna Carta in politics,” Federalists also were unstinting in their praise. “We thought him a Virginian,” one Federalist editor conceded, “and have found him an American—We thought him partisan and have found him a president.”
     Like other great literary achievements, his text reads today as if it were a disparate collection of famous quotations. “But every difference of opinion,” declared the new president, eager to reassure an anxious nation that the transfer of power from one party to the other would be peaceful, “is not a difference of principle.” In the first draft, the persnickety prose stylist had prefaced this sentiment with the phrase “but let it not be imagined that,” but he cut the extraneous words in draft number two. Jefferson then uttered the statement that soon echoed around the country, “We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists.” Paradoxically, he still defined the most pressing threat as the federal government, the very