THIRTY-NINE
Considering the extraordinary character of the times in which we live, our attention should unremittingly be fixed on the safety of our country.
—THOMAS JEFFERSON, in his final message to Congress
IT WAS ALMOST TIME to go. “The diseased jaw bone having exfoliated, the piece was extracted about a week ago, the place is healed, the swelling nearly subsided, and I wait only for moderate weather to resume my rides,” Jefferson wrote Patsy in his last Washington winter.
“I am already sensible of decay in the power of walking, and find my memory not so faithful as it used to be,” he wrote his old colleague Charles Thomson on Christmas Day 1808. “This may be partly owing to the incessant current of new matter flowing constantly through it; but I ascribe to years their share in it also.”
He had been at this for so long. As he inventoried the furniture in the President’s House and thought about how to pay his bills (he estimated he was eight to ten thousand dollars more in debt from his years as president), he knew an epoch was coming to a close—an age that had lasted more than forty years, through war and peace, at home and abroad, all over the Atlantic world from Williamsburg and Richmond to Philadelphia and New York and Annapolis to Paris and London and Amsterdam and finally to this nascent capital on the Potomac. He came to think of these decades in mythic terms: he and his colleagues—Madison, Adams, Washington, Rush, Page, and so many others now gone—as Argonauts of old.
He had, he believed, done his duty. “Nature intended me for the tranquil pursuits of science by rendering them my supreme delight,” he wrote Pierre S. du Pont on Thursday, March 2, 1809. “But the enormities of the times in which I have lived have forced me to take a part in resisting them, and to commit myself on the boisterous ocean of political passions. I thank God for the opportunity of retiring from them without censure, and carrying with me the most consoling proofs of public approbation. I leave everything in the hands of men so able to take care of them, that if we are destined to meet misfortunes, it will be because no human wisdom could avert them.”
He inspired as much division in his exit as he had in his election eight years before. “A few fleeting years will scarce have passed away before the men even of the present day, casting a retrospective eye upon these times, will be seized with wonder and astonishment at the strange contrarity of opinions, the strange bickerings we have fallen into, and the unaccountable distrust that seems to exist,” the Allegany County, Maryland, citizens wrote him on Monday, February 20, 1809.
The distrust was real, though, and sentiment could not blunt the parting attacks of his foes. “Thou strange inconsistent man!” a New Yorker wrote in February 1809.
“You have brought the government to the jaws of destruction,” wrote “Cassandra” from Philadelphia on Tuesday, February 28. “I do not undertake to say whether by supineness, timidity, or enthusiasm. The effect is certain. On the cause I cannot pronounce.”
Jefferson himself was reflective and candid. In reply to a request for recommendations for which books of history to read, Jefferson suggested a long list that included Edward Gibbon, and spoke of what it felt like to make, not just read, history. “I suppose indeed that in public life a man whose political principles have any decided character, and who has energy enough to give them effect, must always expect to encounter political hostility from those of adverse principles,” Jefferson wrote. “But I came to the government under circumstances calculated to generate peculiar acrimony. I found all its offices in the possession of a political sect who wished to transform it ultimately into the shape of their darling model the English government.”
The Republican victory of 1800, Jefferson said, “had blown all their designs, and they found themselves and their fortresses of power and profit put in a moment into the hands of other trustees. Lamentations and invective were all that remained to them.”
The target? Jefferson himself. “I became of course the butt of everything which reason, ridicule, malice and falsehood could supply,” he said.
Still, accolades and tributes arrived regularly. From France, the U.S. consul at Paris sent Jefferson a book about Marcus Aurelius. “In the character of Marcus Aurelius I perceive only one error: he employed no sure means to perpetuate the blessings of his reign,” the consul wrote. “He seemed constantly impressed with the idea that, at the moment of his extinction, the noble fabric which he [sewed], must infallibly sink in ruins. For this, as in every other respect, the citizens of the United States are more fortunate than the Romans, as there is every reason to believe that the benefits of the present enlightened administration will extend to other generations.”
The challenges endured. Jefferson constantly weighed the question of war versus embargo. “We are all politics here,” he wrote Charles L. Bankhead, who had married his granddaughter Ann Cary Randolph in September 1808. “The Congressional campaign is just opening,” Jefferson had written Levi Lincoln in November 1808. “Three alternatives alone are to be chosen from. 1. Embargo. 2. War. 3. Submission and tribute. And, wonderful to tell, the last will not want advocates.”
There were no good choices. “Here, everything is uncertain,” Jefferson wrote Thomas Mann Randolph, Jr., from Washington in December.
James Madison’s inauguration fell on a Saturday. The day before—March 3, 1809—Samuel Harrison Smith paid tribute to the departing Jefferson in the National Intelligencer. “Never will it be forgotten as long as liberty is dear to man,” the paper said, “that it was on this day that Thomas Jefferson retired from the supreme magistracy amidst the blessings and regrets of millions.”
On the morning of the inaugural, Jefferson left the President’s House and rode up to the Capitol to watch his beloved friend and secretary of state take the oath as the fourth president of the United States. (He and a grandson departed the mansion by themselves; Madison was being escorted along Pennsylvania Avenue in military pomp.) No one on earth was closer to him politically, and Madison’s success was a vindication for Jefferson—a tangible sign that the country approved of his basic vision and stewardship.
After the ceremonies in the House chamber—John Quincy Adams thought the setting “very magnificent,” and observed Jefferson smiling with satisfaction—the now-former president called on the new president at the Madisons’ on F Street; Jefferson would not move out of the President’s House until a week later. Mrs. Madison looked “extremely beautiful … dressed in a plain cambric dress with a very long train … all dignity, grace, and affability,” said Margaret Bayard Smith.
As the Madisons stood at the drawing room door greeting the overflowing crowd of callers—the streets were crowded with carriages, and there was a half hour’s wait to get inside—Jefferson saw Margaret Bayard Smith and reached for her hand.
“Remember the promise you have made me, to come to see us next summer, do not forget it,” he said to Mrs. Smith, “for we shall certainly expect you.”
Mrs. Smith, of course, reassured him that she and her husband would come to Monticello. She then alluded to the drama of the day.
“You have now resigned a heavy burden,” she said to Jefferson.
“Yes indeed,” he said, “and am much happier at this moment than my friend.”
In the swirl of the celebration, Jefferson was soon told that “the ladies” hoped to follow him to the President’s House. Twinkling, he said: “That is right, since I am too old to follow them. I remember in France, when his friends were taking leave of Dr. Franklin, the ladies smothered him with embraces, and on his introducing me as his successor, I told him I wished he would transfer these privileges to me, but he answered, ‘You are too young a man.’ ”
That evening he joined celebrating Republicans at an inaugural ball. John Quincy Adams was unimpressed. “The crowd was excessive—the heat oppressive, and the entertainment bad.”
At Monticello he planned to return to farming and gardening with passionate zeal. “I am full of plans of employment when I get there,” he wrote Charles Thomson, and “they chiefly respect the active functions of the body. To the mind I shall administer amusement chiefly. An only daughter and numerous family of grandchildren will furnish me great resources of happiness.”
He had suggested that perhaps his sister Anne Scott Marks could act as mistress. Patsy hated the thought. She—no one else—was to form the core of his world. “As to Aunt Marks it would not be desirable to have her,” Patsy wrote on Thursday, March 2, 1809. “I had full proof of her being totally incom[petent] to the business the last summer. The servants have no sort of respect for her and take just what they please before her face. She is an excellent creature and a neat manager in a little way, but she has neither head nor a sufficient weight of character to manage so large an establishment as yours will be. I shall devote myself to it and with feeling, which I never could have in my own affairs, and with what tenderness of affection we will wait upon and cherish you My Dearest Father.”
As he ended his Washington days, he ordered an abridgment of John Bell’s book Principles of Surgery, sent a geranium he had cultivated and kept in the President’s House to Margaret Bayard Smith, and arranged payment for three dozen Windsor chairs he had ordered from Richmond for Poplar Forest, his retreat in Bedford County.
Edmund Bacon had come to Washington to help pack up and move Jefferson home. The Monticello overseer was struck by the unceasing demands the capital made on his employer. “He had a very long dining room, and his table was chock-full every one of the sixteen days I was there,” Bacon wrote. Bacon supervised the loading of three wagons with boxes and shrubbery.
Bacon and this entourage set out from Washington on Thursday, March 9, 1809; Jefferson left the capital on Saturday, March 11, in a phaeton. There was a terrible snowstorm along the way, and Bacon prepared Jefferson’s accommodations at Benjamin Shackelford’s Culpeper Courthouse tavern by ordering a large fire to be built and by fending off a drunken well-wisher eager to see the man he called “Old Tom.” Bacon tried to keep the crowds away from Jefferson when he arrived, but failed, and Jefferson delivered a short speech to the gathering. He was still a public man.
On Wednesday, March 15, 1809, Thomas Jefferson reached Monticello. He brought the great world with him. His chef Julien came to set up the Monticello kitchen to prepare the French dishes Jefferson loved. His correspondence and reading were varied and voluminous. Home to stay, he was never again to stray very far from his mountaintop. His mind was another matter. It never came to rest.