The Road to Monticello Read online

  THE ROAD TO MONTICELLO

  THE ROAD TO MONTICELLO

  THE LIFE AND MIND OF

  Thomas Jefferson

  KEVIN J. HAYES

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Hayes, Kevin J.

  The road to Monticello: the life and mind of Thomas Jefferson / by Kevin J. Hayes.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references.

  ISBN 978–0–19–530758–0

  1. Jefferson, Thomas, 1743–1826—Books and reading. 2. Jefferson, Thomas, 1743–1826—Literary art. 3. Jefferson, Thomas, 1743–1826—Notebooks, sketchbooks, etc. 4. Jefferson, Thomas, 1743–1826—Influence. 5. Presidents—United States—Biography. 6. Monticello (Va.)—History. 7. United States—Intellectual life—1783–1865. I. Title.

  E332.2.H395 2007

  973.4′6092—dc22 2007005039

  Image on title page appears courtesy of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation

  1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2

  Printed in the United States of America

  on acid-free paper

  For my parents

  CONTENTS

  PART I: THE EDUCATION OF THOMAS JEFFERSON

  1. Fire!

  2. A Boy and His Books

  3. A Correct, Classical Scholar

  4. William and Mary

  5. The Williamsburg Circle

  6. The Limits of English Law

  7. A Shelf of Notebooks

  8. Becoming a Burgess

  PART II: FAMILY AND NATION

  9. Domestic Life and Literary Pursuits

  10. Rude Bard of the North

  11. A Summary View of the Rights of British America

  12. The Pen and the Tomahawk

  13. The Declaration of Independence

  14. The Book Culture of Philadelphia and Williamsburg, Contrasted

  15. Of Law and Learning

  16. Lines of Communication

  17. Notes on the State of Virginia

  18. The Narrow House

  19. An American Odyssey

  PART III: OUR MAN IN PARIS

  20. Bookman in Paris

  21. Talking about Literature

  22. London Town

  23. Summer of ’86

  24. An Inquisitive Journey through France and Italy

  25. A Tour through Holland and the Rhine Valley

  26. Last Days in Paris

  PART IV: SERVANT OF THE PEOPLE

  27. The Young Idea

  28. The Anas

  29. Letters from a Virginia Farmer

  30. The Vice President and the Printed Word

  31. The First Inaugural Address

  32. The Wall of Separation

  33. “Life of Captain Lewis”

  34. The President as Patron of Literature

  PART V: MONTICELLO

  35. Return to Monticello

  36. Letters to an Old Friend

  37. The Library of Congress

  38. The Retirement Library

  39. The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth

  40. The Autobiography

  41. The University of Virginia from Dream to Reality

  42. The Life and Soul of the University

  Acknowledgments

  An Essay on Sources

  Notes

  Index

  PART I

  THE EDUCATION OF THOMAS JEFFERSON

  CHAPTER 1

  Fire!

  Fire! The word struck fear into every homeowner in colonial America. In a land where homes were shingled with wood, heated by wood, and lit with candles, fires were inevitable. All a person could do was to take some modest precautions and then try not to worry about the damage an errant spark might cause. There is no evidence to indicate that Thomas Jefferson, the youthful master of the family plantation in the Virginia Piedmont known as Shadwell, was worried about the mansion house there when he left home one February afternoon in 1770 to conduct some business in nearby Charlottesville. Already he had been master of Shad-well for half his life, since the death of his father, Peter Jefferson, thirteen years earlier. Having left the property countless times before, occasionally for months at a stretch, he had no reason to be more concerned this day than any other.

  But during his brief absence, the house caught fire. The blaze spread quickly, and the house was soon engulfed. Both the building and its contents were almost completely consumed. The Virginia Gazette reported that Jefferson’s home “burnt to the ground with all his furniture, books, papers, &c.” He was less concerned with the furniture or the et cetera: the loss of his books and papers pained him much more. Family tradition tells what happened next. From Shadwell a slave was dispatched to locate Jefferson and inform him of the disaster. Once he told him what had happened, Jefferson had but one question: what about the books? The answer he received was disturbing. No, the man informed him, none of the books had survived.1

  Though this anecdote may not indicate precisely what happened that day, it has the ring of truth. The story conveys something expressed in many different ways over the course of his life: Jefferson was a man with a profound love of books. Both the Virginia Gazette report and this traditional anecdote suggest that he lost his entire library; other accounts of the fire hint that some books had survived. In his own writings, Jefferson mentioned the incident multiple times. Into his copy of that year’s almanac, which doubled as his daily memorandum book, he inscribed a laconic note: “Lost all my papers accts. etc. by fire.”2 Appearing among other legal notations rather than within his day-to-day accounts, this note confirms the loss of his legal papers. It does not mean he lost all his papers. Many of the separate notebooks he started before 1770 do survive. This et cetera may refer to his books, but there’s no way to tell.

  His correspondence sheds some light on the true extent of his loss. Writing the Reverend James Ogilvie, who had visited Shadwell earlier, Jefferson explained, “Since you left us I was unlucky enough to lose the house in which we lived, and in which all its contents were consumed. A very few books, two or three beds etc. were with difficulty saved from the flames.”3 Familiar with the contents of the house, Ogilvie could appreciate what his friend had lost.

  A letter to another friend, John Page, describes the damage in slightly more detail. Jefferson lamented: “My late loss may perhaps have reached you by this time, I mean the loss of my mother’s house by fire, and in it, of every paper I had in the world, and almost every book. On a reasonable estimate I calculate the cost of the books burned to have been £200. sterling. Would to god it had been the money; then had it never cost me a sigh!”4 Jefferson’s preference for books
over money places him among the cadre of true book lovers.

  Since this lament occurs in a letter to Page, however, it must be read with a raised eyebrow. The two had become close friends in their teens while classmates at the College of William and Mary. When they were apart, they often amused each other by exchanging cleverly crafted letters. Though overshadowed in literary history by his correspondence with John Adams, Jefferson’s letters to Page represent some of his finest belletristic writing. They show him using a variety of literary and rhetorical devices, including hyperbole. For example, his earliest known letter to Page, written on Christmas 1762, begins, “This very day, to others the day of greatest mirth and jollity, sees me overwhelmed with more and greater misfortunes than have befallen a descendant of Adam for these thousand years past I am sure; and perhaps, after excepting Job, since the creation of the world.”5

  Describing personal events to Page, Jefferson typically exaggerated them to tell a better story. Before concluding each letter, he would lay bare his exaggerations to reveal what had really happened and how he truly felt. The letter describing the Shadwell fire is no exception. Early in its text Jefferson stated that he had lost almost every book he owned, but toward its end he elaborated the extent of the destruction in greater detail: “To make the loss more sensible it fell principally on my books of common law, of which I have but one left, at that time lent out. Of papers too of every kind I am utterly destitute. All of these, whether public or private, of business or of amusement have perished in the flames.”6 These remarks verify the loss of manuscript material but qualify the loss of books, implying that some books in other subjects escaped the blaze.

  Beyond the loss of books, the loss of private papers “of amusement” is also regrettable. Except for his letters to Page and a few other friends, nothing of a belletristic nature in Jefferson’s possession before 1770 survives. Later he admitted that he had been guilty of writing some doggerel in his youth, but no specimens of his early poetry survive. The absence of such pleasure-writing keeps the portrait of young Jefferson in the shadows.

  The loss of so much manuscript material by fire gave Jefferson an object lesson in the value of the printed word. When documents exist in unique manuscript copies, they and the ideas they contain are always in danger of destruction. Discussing the importance of preserving the laws of Virginia and considering the ease with which unique manuscripts could be destroyed, Jefferson observed:

  All the care I can take of them will not preserve them from the worm, from the natural decay of the paper, from the accidents of fire, or those of removal, when it is necessary for any public purpose. … Our experience has proved to us that a single copy, or a few, deposited in MS. in the public offices, cannot be relied on for any great length of time. The ravages of fire and of ferocious enemies have had but too much part in producing the very loss we now deplore. How many of the precious works of antiquity were lost, while they existed only in manuscript? Has there ever been one lost since the art of printing has rendered it practicable to multiply and disperse copies? This leads us then to the only means of preserving those remains of our laws now under consideration, that is, a multiplication of printed copies.7

  Print can help preserve and perpetuate the written word. Works that are printed and widely disseminated not only influence the thought and actions of mankind, but also ensure the survival of the written word and therefore make it possible that the ideas those words contain can continue to influence the thought and actions of mankind. In the age of mechanical reproduction, there seems no reason not to make multiple copies of important documents to guard against fire and other forms of destruction.

  Recognizing that unique manuscripts could be lost by pure chance, Jefferson understood that pure chance determined their survival, too. Documents that escape conflagration become the stuff of history. Though Jefferson preserved an extraordinary quantity of his personal manuscripts, he did not preserve everything. Entering public life shortly before witnessing the birth of a new nation and becoming a central player in its drama, he foresaw that his papers, regardless how personal, would also become a part of history.

  Consequently, he destroyed many of his most personal papers, including the complete set of letters he and his wife exchanged during their courtship and throughout their marriage, a correspondence that, in terms of literary quality, may have exceeded the letters he wrote either Adams or Page. Jefferson carefully guarded his personal life: he was unwilling to leave the destruction of documents to chance. Though he kept much, he destroyed what he wanted to destroy, leaving a record that is quite full in terms of his professional and public life, but murky when it comes to his personal life.

  Discerning which of Jefferson’s books survived the Shadwell fire and which perished is difficult. The survivors became part of the great library Jefferson assembled over the next four decades and ultimately sold to the federal government in 1815 to replace the first Congressional library, which itself was destroyed by fire during the War of 1812. Jefferson’s personal collection thus formed the core of the Library of Congress, which, in turn, suffered further destruction in 1851, when the U.S. Capitol, where the books were housed, caught fire. Many of those volumes that managed to survive the 1770 fire at Shadwell did not survive the 1851 fire at Washington.

  Hundreds of books printed before 1770 survive with evidence of Jefferson’s ownership, but seldom do these survivors divulge whether he acquired them before 1770. Though Jefferson inscribed unique marks of ownership in his books, rarely did he date his inscriptions. Over time, he changed the way he inscribed his books, so differences among the survivors can help approximate the dates he acquired some of them.

  No surviving book is more useful for dating Jefferson’s marks of ownership than the 1752 Oxford edition of the Book of Common Prayer that he inherited from his father.8 The front flyleaf is inscribed:

  Peter Jefferson

  30th April 1753

  This prayer book is listed as part of the estate inventory prepared after Peter Jefferson’s death when his older son inherited it with the rest of his father’s books. Once the volume entered his possession, Thomas inscribed its title page with the following:

  Ex Libris

  Thomae Jefferson

  Fourteen years old when his father died, young Jefferson showed his age, and something of his personality, with this inscription. The latinization of his Christian name reveals his boyhood love of the classical languages. The inscription seemed jejune in retrospect. He regretted it and later defaced the book’s title page in a half-hearted attempt to obscure the inscription.

  Jefferson ultimately devised a simple, yet elegant way of marking his books, which he continued using throughout his life. At a time when other members of the Virginia gentry showed off their books by adorning them with specially commissioned, engraved armorial book-plates, Jefferson used a scarcely noticeable method to identify his. Given the democratic values that formed the core of his political philosophy, it is understandable that he eschewed the aristocratic pretensions that armorial bookplates embodied.

  Just because he never used a bookplate does not mean he never thought about using one. As he rebuilt his personal library after the Shadwell fire, he asked friend and fellow Virginian Thomas Adams, then living in England and working in the mercantile trade, to see if he could locate the Jefferson coat of arms. The letter containing this request has been quoted as proof of Jefferson’s curiosity about his family lineage. Since the letter was written as he was busy rebuilding his library, the request may have had a more pragmatic purpose: Jefferson was considering an engraved armorial bookplate. Even as he asked Adams to locate the family crest, he did not disguise his condescension toward the whole idea: “Search the Herald’s office for the arms of my family. I have what I have been told were the family arms, but on what authority I know not. It is possible there may be none. If so I would with your assistance become a purchaser, having Sterne’s word for it that a coat of arms may be purchased as cheap
as any other coat.”9

  Laurence Sterne was one of Jefferson’s favorite authors. Five years before the Shadwell fire, Jefferson had acquired a two-volume edition of Sterne’s popular devotional work, The Sermons of Mr. Yorick.10 In his two most lasting books—The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy—Sterne makes brief, satirical comments about heraldry. In his correspondence, Jefferson alluded to Tristram Shandy as early as 1766.11 But he had a different work in mind as he made this remark to Thomas Adams. Jefferson’s editors have yet to identify the allusion, but he was thinking about A Political Romance, the controversial pamphlet Sterne published in 1759. The pamphlet was so controversial that its publication was suppressed. Nearly the entire printing was burned: only a few copies escaped the flames. From one surviving copy, A Political Romance was reprinted in the collected edition of his works published the year after Sterne’s death. Jefferson’s allusion to it shows how deeply his attention to Sterne went and indicates another title that had been in his Shadwell library, the five-volume edition of The Works of Laurence Sterne published in 1769.

  Telling his correspondent to search the Herald’s office, Jefferson had in mind the scene in Sterne’s political allegory where a parson searches the parish register and discovers an important piece of information about a watch-coat that represented his position, which he was attempting to secure by inheritance for his young son: “The great watch-coat was purchased and given, above two hundred years ago, by the lord of the manor, to this parish-church, to the sole use and behoof of the poor sextons thereof, and their successors for ever, to be worn by them respectively in winterly cold nights in ringing complines, passing-bells, etc.”12 Sterne’s political allegory emphasizes how patently absurd were the ingrained traditions of inheritance and established laws of entail that limited inheritance to specific persons. Working to establish a democracy in the coming years, Jefferson would fight hard to eliminate such ideas about inheritance.