Overview
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Thomas Jefferson's personal life has always been a puzzle to biographers. Even his contemporaries found him difficult to know.
In Jefferson's correspondence, however, Andrew Burstein has found a key to the inner man. Burstein confronts widespread misunderstandings about Jefferson's romantic life and provides insight into the contradictions that still surround our third president. He shows Jefferson to have been a man of substance and character, yet possessed of a mean streak, alternatively strong and frail, convivial and reclusive, ordinary and extraordinary.
The Inner Jefferson removes our modern preconceptions and re-creates the mental and moral world of the eighteenth century. Burstein discovers how in the wake of the American Revolution this retiring Virginian could become to some a popular idol while appearing to others a cold and calculating subversive.