|
The Amazon Wine Store
Shop wines from California, Washington, Oregon, New York and more; plus, find wines with a 90+ professional rating. Ship up to six bottles of your favorite wine for just $9.99. Learn more. |
Product Details
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images? |
Passions depicts Jefferson at leisure and does not emphasize his career as statesman except when necessary to develop the narrative. Nor does it address the controversy over Jefferson's moral character ignited by his complicity in slavery, a pointless debate which lamentably fixates modern revisionists. But despite its limited scope, in offering a more vivid account of Jefferson the man, Gabler's research probes certain mysteries about Jefferson's public life, particularly the question why, following his legendary work as a founding father of the nation, his Presidency was less successful. Gabler's Jefferson is a loner whose widowing as a young man left him heartbroken and somewhat estranged from the nation he sired. He sought comfort in a sort of exile across Europe, never quite establishing a home but immersing himself in the best of what its cultures offered. From Gabler's account, one surmises that Jefferson could have retired happily in that fashion but returned to Washington when duty obliged him to serve as Secretary of State, and then as President.
Gabler's final chapters describe with mouthwatering clarity a series of dinners which Jefferson hosted in the White House for friends and fellow statesmen, which he funded personally despite his dwindling wealth. He served wine after dinner, but the meals retained about them some elements of the colonial frontier, with cider or porter's ale accompanying the food. At one such dinner, an invitee expressed surprise at receiving an invitation requesting the "favour of his company" on behalf of "Thomas Jefferson," rather than "the President of the United States." As such details suggest, these chapters are interesting evocations of a time when Americans' aversion to the trappings of entrenched power remained visceral. Gabler's accounts of these evenings also leave one warmed that a man so monumental as Jefferson seemed most content gathered around a table with old wine and old friends.