Unsurprising it would be to find that many persons, decently familiar with Thomas Jefferson (and that includes Early American historians), were unaware that he had a brother. Biographers sometimes passingly mention Randolph early in a Jeffersonian biography inasmuch as Thomas, as the older brother, was saddled with the task of choosing between a tract of land on the Rivanna River or another on the James River, when father Peter Jefferson died. When Thomas chose the former, the latter went to brother, Randolph. Merrill Peterson, in his biography of over 1000 pages, devotes one sentence to Randolph. “With his only brother, Randolph, so much younger, he was never close.” Norman Risjord says nothing about Randolph other than he “seems to have been mentally retarded.” Susan Kern, who writes of life for the Jeffersons at Shadwell, says merely what is all too, and unhelpfully, obvious: that “the tone of Thomas’s letters to his brother reveals a paternal relationship.” Others—e.g., Gilbert Chinard, Joe Ellis, John Boles, Christopher Hitchens, Lawrence Kaplan, and Kevin Gutzman—completely neglect Jefferson’s brother in their biographies.
Bernard Mayo in 1942 edits 28 of the 32 letters between Thomas Jefferson and younger brother Randolph in Thomas Jefferson and His Unknown Brother Randolph. In the short book, Mayo offers a thin introduction, a mere four pages, to the thin correspondence. Mayo presumably thinks that all that needs to be said about the relationship between the brothers Jefferson can be said in four pages of prose. “The letters treat of family and agricultural matters, and in some degree enlarge one’s knowledge of Jefferson’s domestic life. But they are primarily interesting because they reveal Thomas Jefferson’s affection, patient kindness, and desire to help a brother strikingly inferior.” Mayo concludes that Randolph was merely a “earth-bound farmer.”
Most scholars, given the scant attention Randolph Jefferson receives in any biography of Thomas Jefferson—in many biographies, as we have seen, he is mentioned, if at all, merely as one of several siblings—certainly agree with Mayo’s assessment. It is also significant that the massive, three-volume biography of Thomas Jefferson by Henry S. Randall—a biography that tells us so much about the domestic life of Jefferson—does not have an entry for Randolph Jefferson in its index. Even more astonishing is granddaughter Sarah N. Randolph’s The Domestic Life of Thomas Jefferson. The book contains a slightly truncated version of the first letter between the brothers, but there is nothing said about the letter or about Randolph Jefferson.
Dumas Malone, the first of the two great Jeffersonian scholars, in his six-volume biography of Jefferson over four decades devotes a couple of paragraphs to Randolph, but his assessment of the younger brother is unflattering. “The contrast between her [Randolph’s sister Anne Scott] twin brother Randolph and their brother Thomas may be said to exemplify the natural inequality of men, since the opportunities of the two were not dissimilar.” Like Thomas, Randolph was privately educated. Like Thomas, Randolph attended William and Mary College. Like Thomas, Randolph was generously endowed with over 2,000 acres of land on the death of father, Peter Jefferson. Nonetheless, unlike Thomas, he seemed to benefit little from his educative experiences and ever had difficulties with management of his plantation on the Fluvanna River (a tributary of the James River), to be called Snowden. By nature, injudicious and diffident, he was easily swayed, even buffaloed, by others. Randolph, says Malone, relied mightily on his older brother for assistance in everyday affairs.
And so, it seems, we have a received view. The brothers Jefferson were equally endowed with opportunities for personal success, but while Thomas not only flourished but also became one of the greatest luminaries of his day, Randolph, though a Virginian planter, wallowed in relative obscurity and leaned heavily on his older brother for plantational advice due to mental debility.
In 2012, independent researcher Joanne Yeck offers a challenge to the received view: Randolph’s sluggishness and insignificance as symptoms of some degree of mental impairment. In her The Jefferson Brothers, Yeck especially challenges Mayo’s thesis. Randolph, says she, was not “mentally retarded,” and he was more than Mayo’s “earth-bound farmer.” Her book promises critical reassessment of Randolph Jefferson and impresses by its bulk. She crafts nearly 450 pages and aims to show that Randolph Jefferson was in his own way a historically significant person at least inasmuch as any relatively successful Virginian planter might have been. His dimwittedness is apparent, not real. It appears to be on account of having the fate of being Thomas Jefferson’s brother, for “with a yardstick like Thomas Jefferson for a brother, who wouldn’t come in a very poor second?” Yeck’s Randolph is in many ways crafted to be more similar, than dissimilar, to his older brother. The question posed by Malone, however, goes unanswered by Yeck: With many of the same opportunities were shared—education and wealthy—just why did Randolph “come in a very poor second” and not turn out more like brother Thomas?
While Mayo says all that he needs to say about Thomas and Randolph in four pages—material, after all, on Randolph is skimp—Yeck is profuse. Why does Yeck attempt such a voluminous corrective when we know so little about Randolph?
Yeck does admit that information is wanting for a biography of Randolph Jefferson. We have no account books, no diary, and no letters of Randolph, other than his letters to brother, Thomas, and those are in our possession because of Thomas’ meticulous keeping of records.
Yeck, thus, approaches indirectly the life of Randolph.
First, Yeck digs for information, wherever she can find it. She employs, for instance, courthouse records and tax records as well as the diaries of others familiar with Randolph or of a similar social status as Randolph. In doing so, she does unearth a wealth of data. The nodus, unfortunately, is that such data tell us much about events in and around Scott’s Ferry, just north of Randolph’s Snowden, but too little about Randolph and Snowden.
Second, Yeck works analogically. If we do not know the particulars of Randolph’s life, we do have particulars of the lives of others who interacted with him or who lived near to him and of similar socio-economic status: e.g., if Randolph behaved like his schoolmate, P, about whom we have records that show that P lived such-and-such life, we can infer that Randolph too lived such-and-such life. Nonetheless, arguments from analogical inferences are merely too tenuous to be very aidful, because they are wholly conjectural, for sound biography.
And so, because of her indirect approach, the book, qua biography, is of limited assistance, at least, when it comes to telling Randolph’s story. This book is in part a corrective to her thesis.
If the material on Randolph’s life is so scant and if what we know of Randolph can be succinctly expressed in four pages, what is the value another (i.e., this) collection of Thomas and Randolph’s correspondence in addition to Mayo’s? I add, more to the point, if Randolph’s life was so ordinary, even inconsequential—a point too that Yeck makes, why is there need of another commentary, my commentary, on the correspondence?
There has never been a comprehensive critical analysis of the exchange of letters between the brothers Jefferson. There is a 1981 edition of Mayo’s collection, co-edited by James Bear, that has all the known letters (32) between Thomas and Randolph, but that collection offers little in the way of critical inspection. In Thomas Jefferson & His Younger Brother, A Study in Cosmopolitanism & Parochialism, I offer a thorough critical analysis of the correspondence of the brothers Jefferson—the letters themselves upon critical analysis tell us much about Thomas and Randolph—and critical analysis of the letters has hitherto never fully been done.
With so little known about the life of Randolph Jefferson, the letters between the brothers tell us very much about Randolph: viz., about the relevance of his education, about the scope of his interests, about his ability to process information, about his capacity to direct his affairs, about his health, and about the nature of his relationships with his sons, with his second wife Mitchie, and with his older brother, inter alia. The correspondence also tells us about the degree of Thomas’ feelings for Randolph. Thomas watched over his younger brother throughout his life from a sense of filial duty, but he never felt filial love from his brother. They were merely too dissimilar. No one has taken the time to inspect fully the correspondence.
Thomas Jefferson & His Younger Brother has an introduction that covers the early history of the lives of the brothers Jefferson till the correspondence begins in 1789, and then three main parts, which may be considered as long chapters. In chapter 1, I cover the early letters of the correspondence: all written by Thomas to Randolph. There are only three letters. Chapter 2 begins with a letter, early in 1807, from Thomas to Randolph and penned after a lacuna of 15 years. It ends in 1812. There are 12 letters—six by each brother. The final chapter contains the remaining letters between the brothers. There are 17 letters, with nine written by Randolph and eight written by Thomas, and they range from 1813 to 1815, the year of Randolph’s unexpected death. I end the book with a concluding section and add six aidful appendices: one, a critical analysis of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation’s refusal to consider the possibility of Randolph Jefferson’s paternity of any of slave Sally Hemings’ children; two, Thomas Jefferson’s deposition on the death of his brother, a very valuable document that sheds much light on their relationship; three, the children of Peter and Jane Jefferson (parents of the brothers); four, the children of Randolph Jefferson and Anne J. Lewis (Randolph’s first wife); five, the child of Randolph Jefferson and Mitchie B. Pryor (Randolph’s second wife); and six, a review of Joanne L. Yeck’s The Jefferson Brothers. The rationale for the fifth appendix is that Yeck’s is the only book that aims to tell the story of Randolph Jefferson. Hers is a valiant attempt of nearly 450 pages, but ultimately it winds up telling us little more about Randolph than we have learned in Mayo’s four-page preface of the letters between the brothers.
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