Thomas Jefferson and His Younger Brother

One of the topics overlooked by Jeffersonian scholars is Jefferson’s younger brother Randolph. Why? Most deem that relationship of little consequence in Jefferson’s life or of little influence in the development of his “Enlightened” thinking. While Thomas Jefferson was keenly interested in the events of the world and polymathic in understanding (i.e., robustly cosmopolitan), Randolph Jefferson cared little about global events and constantly required the assistance of his older brother to manage his plantation at Snowden (i.e., dimly parochial and perhaps mentally challenged). This book is a complete collection of the correspondence, with critical commentary, between the brothers Jefferson. That correspondence, when put under the author’s analytic microscope, reveals some stark disclosures about Thomas Jefferson, family man.