Grave Youth

THE YOUNG JEFFERSON--Claude 6. Bowers--Houghfon, Mifflin ($3.75).

Thomas Jefferson was once young but never youthful. Something--a quality of youthful zest or spontaneity--was left out of his makeup. The lack set him apart from the men of his own age in his own time and left him a lonely figure in the great gallery of American heroes.

He was born a statesman. At 17 he was a friend, on a plane of intellectual equality, of the Royal Governor of Virginia. At 24 he was one of the five most prosperous lawyers in the colony. At 26, the builder of Monticello was the master of broad acres, honored by the British Government, a member of the House of Burgesses. At 33, the author of the Declaration of Independence was, with Washington and Franklin, one of the few Americans who belonged on any list of the world's great men.

Legendary Lack. There has never clustered around Jefferson, as around every other American hero, a native growth of affectionate legends about his early years. Men never told of him, as they did of Washington, historically doubtful but socially significant anecdotes about his truthfulness and strength. They never told the poignant stories that they told of Lincoln's hardships and humor, or even of Andrew Jackson's fiery temper and defiance.

This lack of legends may be accounted for by the fact that Jefferson was more of an intellectual and less a man of action than perhaps any other American hero. His character was more complex, harder to classify than most. But as a youth he was not precocious or abnormal in the usual sense. He was tall, redheaded, a good horseman, a fiddle player, a hunter, youthfully fond of girls, dancing, cards and conversation. He youthfully spent too much money in his first year at William and Mary (playing cards and sowing his wild oats) and youthfully resolved to do better the next year. But--unyouthfully--he kept his resolve, studied 15 hours a day, and had for his boon companions a great lawyer (George Wythe), a philosopher and mathematician (Dr. William Small), and the witty, gambling Governor Francis Fauquier.

Except for a vague affair with a mysterious Belinda, whose importance in his life Bowers doubts, and his attempted seduction of a married woman, Jefferson's young manhood passed without romance known to history. His marriage to the young widow, Martha Skelton, was happy.

After her early death he had many women friends, to whom he wrote some of the liveliest letters any American President ever penned.

"One looks in vain," says Bowers, "for any convincing evidence that Jefferson availed himself of fine ladies . . . but had he done so he would have been . . . reticent and discreet."

Romance at 43. The closest Jefferson ever came to behaving with youthful indiscretion was at the age of 43, in his affair with Maria Cosway. At 22 this vivid, lovely, talented girl had married Richard Cosway, 39, a friend of the Prince of Wales and the most fashionable miniature painter in London. Maria was herself a painter of distinction, and apparently a virtuous woman, though gossips credited her with love affairs with the Prince of Wales, a singer, a painter, and the secretary of the Neapolitan ambassador.

When Jefferson was Minister to France, Maria and her husband visited Paris, met Jefferson through the American artist, Trumbull. By his own account Jefferson canceled all engagements to remain with the Cosways, sending word to the Duchess d'Enville that he could not dine with her because of dispatches which required his immediate attention.

One day he fell while walking, and sprained his wrist, and Maria insisted that it was her fault. She wrote to him: "Oh, I wish you were well enough to come to us tomorrow to dinner, and stay the evening. ... I would serve you and help you at dinner and divert your pain with good music. . . ."

When Maria and her husband returned to England, Jefferson rode part way with them. He urged her to come to America, pointing out that she could paint Niagara Falls, Natural Bridge and the Potomac River. She wrote him charming, affectionate, entirely proper notes. On one occasion he replied with thousands of words of heavy-handed courtship, a dialogue between his Heart and his Head, in which neither showed to very good advantage. Author Bowers is inclined to doubt that Maria ever became Thomas Jefferson's mistress.

The Author. Claude Bowers, now Ambassador to Chile, has served the Democratic Party long & well with his eloquent tongue and pen. This book, like his Jefferson and Hamilton and Jefferson in Power, is a violently partisan study. Author Bowers writes as if everybody hated Jefferson except himself. Stern with certain sinister, unnamed biographers who have accused Jefferson of frightful misdeeds, he thunders against "the slovenliness and slop" of much writing about his hero.

In default of bright youthful doings to relate, Bowers fills his book with "it is not improbable," and "we can easily imagine"; with "it is to be regretted that no Boswell was on hand to record the brilliant conversation." But so microscopic has been his study of Jefferson's career that contrary-minded readers may easily forgive his constant drawing of contemporary political morals.

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