FORTY
Amidst the din of war and the wreck of nations his wisdom has hitherto secured our peace; his eminent public services are engraved on the hearts of his children.
—Toast to Thomas Jefferson at Tammany Society of Washington on May 12, 1809
IN HIS ROOMS at Monticello, Jefferson slept facing east on a bed built into an alcove between his working study (which was often called his “cabinet”) and a chamber anchored by a fireplace. Red bed curtains hung on each side of the bed. Though the rooms were peaceful, Jefferson was reminded of the passing of time by both sight and sound whenever he rested his head on his pillow. A 1790 clock mounted between two obelisks rested on a wooden shelf inside his sleeping alcove; with a delicate ting, it chimed the hour and the half hour. Below the clock hung a sword—the gift, it was said, of “a long forgotten Arabian prince.” And there were the sounds of Jefferson’s ubiquitous mockingbirds.
Overnight the silence of the chamber was also broken second by second by a tall-case clock placed along the western wall of the study. The tick-tick-tick of the tall clock was constant, growing louder as the house grew quieter through the hours of darkness. When the three doors connecting Jefferson’s rooms to the rest of the house were closed, they formed a surprisingly effective barrier between the master and the household. Four tall windows flanked the sleeping Jefferson in the study to his right; a single window lit the bedroom with the fireplace to his left, a room where he kept his wife’s walnut dressing table.
Jefferson had his own privy just steps away from his bed alcove, one of three in the house proper. He used pieces of scrap paper for hygiene purposes. (Examples were collected from his privy by a family member on the day of Jefferson’s death and now survive in the Library of Congress.)
He generally got five to eight hours of sleep a night, always reading for half an hour or an hour before bedtime, using eyeglasses. As he grew older he had difficulty hearing different voices speaking at the same time. He enjoyed good health, suffering from extremely rare fevers. The headaches that had plagued him in times of stress seemed “now to have left me” once he was free of the clamor of office.
His chambers were in the sun’s direct path. Much of his first sense of light would have come from his right, from the first easterly window in the cabinet. If he awoke, as he said he did, at early sunrise, when the hands of the obelisk clock grew visible, then there would have been a steadily rising tide of light that began as a trickle but soon came to fill the room.
Jefferson would have sat up in his alcove and turned to his left to plunge his feet into his morning basin of cold water. There he would stay for a time, looking at the fireplace and intuitively tracking the rise of the sun by the amount of light coming through the bedroom skylight.
He and his Monticello were a little like the sun itself: at the center of the universe.
The eleven-thousand-square-foot, thirty-three-room house (there are ten other rooms in the pavilions and under the South Terrace) in which he woke up every morning was his joy, and it was only in the years after he retired from the presidency that it was exactly as he wished it to be.
Walking into the entrance hall by the glass front door on the East Front of Monticello, Jefferson, his family, and his guests were immediately immersed in the work of his life. Artifacts and emblems of America’s natural and political worlds hung in the great hall; the floor was green (at the suggestion of Gilbert Stuart), the walls whitewashed with a yellow-orange dado below the chair rail. There were the antlers of moose and elk, the upper jawbone of a mastodon, and forty Indian objects, including carved stone sculptures, tools, a Mandan buffalo robe, and a small portrait of a young Sack chief. There were maps, including the Fry-Jefferson map of Virginia, drawn by his father so long before, and later ones of North America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. There was a scale model of the Pyramid of Cheops.
There was a sculpture, Ariadne, which Jefferson long mistook for one of Cleopatra before realizing the work was a depiction of the tragic mythological heroine. There were the paintings St. Jerome in Meditation and Jesus in the Praetorium, which Jefferson described in detail: “Jesus … stripped of the purple, as yet naked, and with the crown of thorns on his head. He is sitting.… The persons present seem to be one of his revilers, one of his followers, and the superintendent of the execution. The subject from Mark 15:16–20.” There were portraits of Americus Vespucius, John Adams, and of Jefferson himself (by Gilbert Stuart), two engravings of the Declaration of Independence—one of John Trumbull’s depiction of the signing, the other of the document itself—and busts of Hamilton, Voltaire, and Turgot, the French politician and economist.
There was method to the decoration of Monticello. For Jefferson, the portraits, busts, statues, and artifacts in the house were not a random collection but rather “memorials of those worthies whose remembrance I feel a pride and comfort in consecrating there.” Anything—or anyone—represented within Monticello was meaningful to Jefferson in some way and to some degree.
Only steps into the house, then, the range of Jefferson’s mind and heart, the universal nature of his interests and his sense of the sweep of history, were manifest to every eye. The fossils and antlers, the Indian artifacts, and the maps represented the primeval American world and the white man’s first attempts to project power over the land. The pyramid and Ariadne were refugees from the ancient world. The paintings of St. Jerome and of Jesus in the moments before the crucifixion commemorated the vast and inarguable role of religion in the history of western civilization. Vespucius—and Columbus, whose portrait hung in the next room, the parlor—carried the story across the Atlantic to the New World. Voltaire and Turgot represented the work of the philosophes of the Enlightenment. Adams, Hamilton, Jefferson himself, and the Continental Congress in declaring independence from Britain brought the tale forward into the recent past, into the work of the master of the house’s lifetime.
And so it goes, room after room, object after object, engraving after engraving, painting after painting, medallion after medallion throughout Monticello.
To reach the parlor, guests moved beneath the tall ceiling decorated with a plaster relief of an eagle surrounded by stars, across the floor, and under a brass Argand-style lamp and a balcony to cross onto a beautiful floor of cherry and beech—a parquet pattern Jefferson personally designed.
Like the hall, the parlor is eighteen feet, two inches high, and decorated with a Corinthian frieze from the Temple of Jupiter the Thunderer. Here Jefferson crafted a room of tiered artwork surrounding card tables, chairs, sofas, a chess set, a harpsichord, and a pianoforte—a room in which the present life of the house and of the family unfolded in the midst of emblems of the past that had made its owner, and its owner’s nation, possible. “Portraits—24; Paintings—17; Medals—10; Busts—2; Miscellaneous—4,” Jefferson wrote, cataloging the parlor’s decorations.
Here hung paintings and here sat sculptures of the makers of the age—and of the ages: George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Magellan, Napoleon, Lafayette, Columbus, Vespucius, Alexander I, David Rittenhouse, Sir Walter Raleigh, James Madison, Thomas Paine, James Monroe, Louis XVI, John Locke, Sir Isaac Newton, Francis Bacon, Adams, and Jefferson himself both by Trumbull and by Mather Brown. There was an elegant Charles Willson Peale portrait of Jefferson’s grandson Thomas Jefferson Randolph and a medallion of Edward Preble, who triumphed at Tripoli in 1804. As in the hall, there were religious images, too: The Penitent Magdalen, Descent from the Cross, and Herodias Bearing the Head of St. John the Baptist. Two small Sèvres figures—Venus with Cupidand Hope with Cupid—evoked the ancient world.
The brilliantly yellow dining room sits to the right. Through it, separated by double pocket doors on rollers, is the small octagonal tea room. There, Jefferson and his family would eat and converse in what he called his “most honorable suite,” glancing up at busts of Washington, Franklin, Lafayette, and John Paul Jones, all by Jean-Antoine Houdon.
Patsy had a blue sitting room near her father’s private rooms, called the South Square Room, and there was a North Octagonal Room with an alcove bed often used by Dolley and James Madison when they visited.
The upstairs—including the beautiful Dome Room atop the house—was a series of small bedrooms. The center of the house, and the center of life, was downstairs, where Jefferson presided.
If it had not been called Monticello,” a visitor wrote in 1816, “I would call it Olympus, and Jove its occupant.” Jefferson’s family agreed. His “cheerfulness and affection,” a granddaughter recalled, “were the warm sun in which his family all basked and were invigorated.”
He was like a “patriarch of old,” as he put it in a letter to Maria Cosway. “Our mother educated all her children to look up to her father, as she looked up to him herself—literally looked up, as to one standing on an eminence of greatness and goodness,” wrote a granddaughter, Ellen Coolidge. “And it is no small proof of his real elevation that, as we grew older and better able to judge for ourselves, we were more and more confirmed in the opinions we had formed of it.”
His grandchildren loved him and revered him. They followed him on garden walks (never, though, putting a foot on a garden bed, for that “would violate one of his rules”). He never had to raise his voice: Their sense of his authority was so complete that it was unnecessary for him to “utter a harsh word to one of us, or speak in a raised tone of voice, or use a threat,” a granddaughter recalled. “He simply said, ‘do,’ or ‘do not.’ ” And that was that.
He picked fruit for them—usually figs and cherries—with a long stick topped with a hook and net bag, and he organized and presided over races on the grounds. The course was the terrace or around the lawn. Jefferson gave head starts according to ages, and the contestants took off when he dropped his white handkerchief from his outstretched right hand. Awards were three figs, prunes, or dates for the winner; two for second place; and one for third. On some summer nights he had a chess table of his own design—it had been made by John Hemings—set up outside for matches with a granddaughter.
In the wintertime, when the days were short, Jefferson would sit with his family before a fire in the late afternoon. This was the hour, a granddaughter said, “when it grew too dark to read,” and so “in the half hour before candles came in, as we all sat round the fire, he taught us several childish games, and would play them with us.” There was “Cross Questions and Crooked Answers,” a whispering circle game, and “I Love My Love with A,” a pastime in which successive players had to come up with attributes throughout the alphabet.
The arrival of candles signaled an end to games and a resumption of reading. Everything fell quiet as Jefferson “took up his book to read, and we would not speak out of a whisper lest we should disturb him, and generally we followed his example and took a book—and I have seen him raise his eyes from his own book and look round on the little circle of readers, and smile and make some remark to mamma about it.”
Despite the privacy of his rooms—a result of his own planning—he did not like being alone for any great length of time. To preserve the privacy of his rooms, he had constructed Venetian porches, or “porticles,” with blinds that shielded the visibility of his quarters from outside the main house. Once, when he was snowed in at Poplar Forest, he wrote Patsy: “I am like a state prisoner. My keepers set before me at fixed hours something to eat and withdraw.”
His command was total, his love enveloping. On journeys to Bedford he took care to wrap his family in capes, and, if needed, furs. He sang and conversed the whole way and served picnic lunches of cold meat and wine mixed with water.
He once overheard a young granddaughter lament that she had never had a silk dress. One arrived for her from Charlottesville the next day. On another occasion a granddaughter tore a beloved muslin dress on the glass door connecting the hall to the portico. “Grand-papa was standing by and saw the disaster,” the granddaughter recalled. Several days later the former president of the United States came into Patsy’s sitting room adjacent to his own apartment, “a bundle in his hand.” To his granddaughter he said, “I have been mending your dress for you.” It was a new frock.
He might hear a child express a wish for a watch, or for a saddle and bridle, or for a guitar, and would quietly provide them (doing so with borrowed money). He made sure his grandchildren were given Bibles and Shakespeare and writing tables. “Our grandfather seemed to read our hearts, to see our invisible wishes, to be our good genius, to wave the fairy wand, to brighten our young lives by his goodness and his gifts.”
His sense of the needs of others was part of his nature—a nature, one granddaughter said, “so eminently sympathetic, that with those he loved, he could enter into their feelings, anticipate their wishes, gratify their tastes, and surround them with an atmosphere of affection.” A patriarch’s love is rather like a politician’s skill. Both are about perceiving what others want, and trying, within reason, to provide it. That had been the work of Jefferson’s public life and now, in retirement, it was that of his personal life, too.
The good cheer Margaret Bayard Smith had noted in Jefferson at Madison’s inauguration remained evident in the first months of his return to Virginia. “Mr. Jefferson called last week, and dined here yesterday,” Elizabeth Trist wrote a friend from Farmington in April 1809. “I never saw him look better nor appear so happy.”
On her own promised visit to Monticello in the middle of 1809, Margaret Bayard Smith thought Jefferson in a perfect place and frame of mind. “The sun never sees him in bed, and his mind designs more than the day can fulfill, even his long day,” she wrote. “There is a tranquility about him, which an inward peace could alone bestow.”
As he began his retirement, Jefferson enjoyed reading of the public’s confidence in him and the course he had set. “We have been permitted to hear the thunder of war at a distance, and peaceably tread the arduous path of intellectual improvement, unmolested by the awful din of battle, or the more dreadful scenes of devastation that now desolate the nations of the world,” a group of college students wrote on Inauguration Day 1809. An anonymous writer praised him as the greatest of men: “You have, in your public capacity, been to me a father, a protector, a preserver. For these services I will forever render you the tribute of a grateful heart.” An old friend from France offered him the highest flattery: “Though I am convinced that Mr. Madison, your friend and your student, will govern according to the same principles as you have, I cannot help regretting that you did not want to retain the presidency for four more years,” Pierre-Samuel du Pont de Nemours wrote Jefferson in June 1809.
The world still looked to him, and to America, as emblems of hope. “No one knows better than you how difficult it is to do good: men are very evil; their heads are filled with nonsense, and it is so contagious, so tenacious, that not even the great, philosophical chemist Jefferson is able to reduce it to gas so that it evaporates from human judgment,” wrote a Spanish diplomat at Philadelphia.
“What would become of mankind if republican government did not survive in your country?” asked a French correspondent. “I shudder to think of the consequences!”
In his cabinet he wrote with his legs stretched out along a red-leather bench beneath a plantation writing table. He grudgingly spent hours at his table, reading and keeping up with his correspondence, for he was a fully engaged farmer. “My present course of life admits less reading than I wish,” Jefferson wrote Benjamin Rush from Monticello. “From breakfast, or noon at latest, to dinner, I am mostly on horseback, attending to my farms or other concerns, which I find healthful to my body, mind, and affairs.” He ordered samplings of the English mulberry and peach-apricot, as well as wild geese and a ram for the farm. “I am now on horseback among my farms from an early breakfast to a late dinner, with little regard to weather,” he told Lafayette in January 1811. “I find it gives health to body, mind and affairs.”
He had a ready refrain on the subject of politics. “I feel a much greater interest in knowing what has passed two or three thousand years ago, than in what is now passing,” he wrote in 1819. “I read nothing, therefore, but of the heroes of Troy … of Pompey and Caesar, and of Augustus too.”
Yet Jefferson could never fully remove himself from the life of the present. To Lafayette he expressed the hope that the tumults of Europe would work themselves out. “If there be a God, and he is just, his day will come. He will never abandon the whole race of man to be eaten up by the leviathans and mammoths of a day.” He subscribed to the papers, telling Madison that he was “reading the newspapers but little and that little but as the romance of the day, a word of truth now and then comes like a drop of water on the tongue of Dives.” One thing was very clear as he settled back into life on the mountain: He loved, he said, the “ineffable luxury of being owner of my own time.”
With those hours he stayed in close touch with the scientific, educational, and philosophical worlds. William Clark continued to dispatch specimens to the President’s House, and Madison sent the skin of a bighorn sheep from the Rocky Mountains to Monticello on July 4, 1809. (“The bundle being too large for the mail, I shall forward it by some other opportunity.”) Jefferson oversaw the English translation of a French commentary on Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws, debated the origins of the potato with a correspondent, wrote for vine cuttings to cultivate wine, and mused on the role of libraries. “I have often thought that nothing would do more extensive good at small expense than the establishment of a small circulating library in every county to consist of a few well-chosen books, to be lent to the people of the county under such regulations as would secure their safe return in due time,” he said.
In the fall, John Walker, his onetime friend whose wife Jefferson had tried to woo, was sick, and said that he would like to see his old friend. James Monroe wrote Jefferson to tell him “a visit by you to Col. Walker would at this time be considered by him an act of great kindness, and be received with much sensibility.” Betsy Walker was ill, too. Apparently unwilling to risk a scene, Jefferson decided not to pay the call at Belvoir, declining to make the short journey he had so often made in that distant summer during his bachelor days. He sent a gift of a basket of ripe figs, prompting Hugh Nelson, a Walker son-in-law, to thank him and report the sad news that both Walkers were “still very feeble and low.”
He was also forever prepared to refight the years of his governorship. Writing a historian seeking information on the Revolutionary period, he argued that Virginia had always contributed “above par” to the national efforts. Indeed, he said, “our whole occupation was in straining the resources of the state to their utmost, to furnish men, money, provisions and other necessaries to the common cause.”
Word arrived of the brutal death of his old secretary Meriwether Lewis. As Jefferson heard the story, a sleeping servant had heard two pistol shots. Lewis, who had been thought “deranged,” was found “weltering in his blood” with a wound to his head and a fatal shot to the heart; the first had apparently failed to kill him, and he tried to finish the job with the second. This, too, seemed to have been insufficient, and the poor man was left to stab himself with his dirk.
Elijah Fletcher, a visitor from Vermont, left an unsparing account of Jefferson. “Mr. Jefferson is tall, spare, straight in body,” Fletcher wrote in 1811. “His face not handsome but savage—I learnt he was but little esteemed by his neighbors.… The story of Black Sal is no farce—That he cohabits with her and has a number of children by her is a sacred truth—and the worst of it is, he keeps the same children slaves—an unnatural crime which is very common in these parts—This conduct may receive a little palliation when we consider that such proceedings are so common that they cease here to be disgraceful.”
Jefferson coolly recorded the births of Hemings’s children in his farm book along with other details of the lives of his slaves and of the fates of his crops. Jefferson was apparently able to consign his children with Sally Hemings to a separate sphere of life in his mind even as they grew up in his midst. “He was not in the habit of showing partiality or fatherly affection to us children,” said Madison Hemings, who added that Jefferson was, however, “affectionate toward his white grandchildren.”
It was, to say the least, an odd way to live, but Jefferson was a creature of his culture. “The enjoyment of a negro or mulatto woman is spoken of as quite a common thing: no reluctance, delicacy or shame is made about the matter,” Josiah Quincy, Jr., of Massachusetts wrote after a visit to the Carolinas. “It is far from being uncommon to see a gentleman at dinner, and his reputed offspring a slave to the master of the table.”
This was daily reality at Monticello. In a letter to James Parton, Henry Randall reported some observations of Thomas Jefferson Randolph’s from the mountain. Discussing the physical similarities between Jefferson and the children of Sally Hemings, Randolph “said in one case that the resemblance was so close, that at some distance or in the dusk the slave, dressed in the same way, might be mistaken for Mr. Jefferson.” On one occasion, Randolph reported, “a gentleman dining with Mr. Jefferson looked so startled as he raised his eyes from the latter to the servant behind him, that his discovery of the resemblance was perfectly obvious to all.” (Randolph offered these reminiscences to support the theory that Jefferson’s nephew Peter Carr was the father of Sally Hemings’s children—a theory ultimately disproved by DNA research.
For Jefferson such ambiguities and unacknowledged truths were part of life. “I asked Col. R[andolph] why on earth Mr. Jefferson did not put these slaves who looked like him out of the public sight by sending them to his Bedford estate or elsewhere,” Randall wrote Parton. “He said Mr. Jefferson never betrayed the least consciousness of the resemblance—and although he (Col. R[andolph]) had no doubt his mother would have been very glad to have them removed, that both and all venerated Mr. Jefferson too deeply to broach such a topic to him. What suited him, satisfied them.”
What suited Jefferson was the code of denial that defined life in the slave-owning states. It was his plantation, his world, and he would live as he wished. “The secrets of an old Virginia manor house,” wrote Henry Randall, “were like the secrets of an Old Norman Castle.” And such secrets were to be kept as well as they could be. That was how Jefferson wanted it, and in this matter, as in so many others, he was to have his way.
Jefferson sometimes felt his age. “I am little able to walk about,” he wrote Philip Mazzei in July 1811. “Most of my exercise is on horseback, and the powers of life are very sensibly decayed.” Jefferson was acutely aware of his own capacities. “It is wonderful to me that old men should not be sensible that their minds keep pace with their bodies in the progress of decay,” he wrote Benjamin Rush in August 1811. He was proud of his own insights on this score, mildly but unmistakably congratulating himself for recognizing human limitations: “Had not a conviction of the danger to which an unlimited occupation of the executive chair would expose the republican constitution of our government made it conscientiously a duty to retire when I did, the fear of becoming a dotard and of being insensible of it, would of itself have resisted all solicitations to remain.”
His curiosity endured. “How do you do?” he wrote his friend and former attorney general Levi Lincoln in Massachusetts. “What are you doing? Does the farm or the study occupy your time, or each by turns? Do you read law or divinity? And which affords the most curious and cunning learning? Which is most disinterested? And which was it that crucified its Savior?”
On the second day of 1811, Benjamin Rush opened a quiet campaign to bring Jefferson and Adams back into correspondence. “Such an intercourse will be honorable to talents, and patriotism, and highly useful to the cause of republicanism not only in the United States but all over the world,” Rush wrote Jefferson. “Posterity will revere the friendship of two ex-presidents that were once opposed to each other. Human nature will be a gainer by it.” If Jefferson would make the first move, Rush said, all would be well. Adams was ready, and time was likely short. “Tottering over the grave,” Rush said, Adams “now leans wholly upon the shoulders of his old revolutionary friends.”
The Adams-Jefferson friendship had been a victim of the passions of the 1790s. “You remember the machinery which the Federalists played off, about that time,” Jefferson wrote Rush. He recalled the Alien and Sedition Acts, which to Jefferson’s mind were meant “to beat down the friends to the real principles of our Constitution, to silence by terror every expression in their favor, to bring us into war with France and alliance with England, and finally to homologise our Constitution with that of England.”
Rush pressed ahead with his cause, if gently. “Many are the evils of a political life, but none so great as the dissolution of friendships, and the implacable hatreds which too often take their place,” Rush replied.
The second president spent two days at home in Quincy with two visiting neighbors of Jefferson’s. The conversation ranged widely. “Mr. Adams talked very freely of men and of things, and detailed many highly interesting facts in the history of our country, and particularly of his own administration, and of incidents connected with the presidential election of 1800,” wrote Edward Coles, one of the callers. Adams “complained,” too, about Jefferson. “I told him I could not reconcile what he had heard of Mr. Jefferson’s language and conduct to him, with what I had heard [Jefferson] repeatedly say, and that too to friends who were political opponents of Mr. Adams,” Coles wrote. “Upon repeating some of the complimentary remarks thus made by Mr. Jefferson, Mr. Adams not only seemed but expressed himself highly pleased.”
Reassured and surprised by the warm report from the Virginians, Adams changed his tone about Jefferson, displaying, Coles said, “an exalted admiration of his character, and appreciation of his services to his country, as well during the Revolution as subsequently.” Adams then criticized the press for its harshness toward Jefferson, adding: “I always loved Jefferson, and still love him.”
These eight words were all it took for Jefferson. “This is enough for me,” he wrote Rush. “I only needed this knowledge to revive towards him all the affections of the most cordial moments of our lives.” Rush sent word of Jefferson’s sentiments to Adams, who, in turn, wrote Jefferson on New Year’s Day 1812, sending him a copy of John Quincy Adams’s inaugural lectures at Harvard on rhetoric and oratory.
Replying, Jefferson struck the right notes. “A letter from you calls up recollections very dear to my mind,” he wrote from Monticello on Tuesday, January 21, 1812. “It carries me back to the times when, beset with difficulties and dangers, we were fellow laborers in the same cause, struggling for what is most valuable to man, his right of self-government. Laboring always at the same oar, with some wave ever ahead threatening to overwhelm us and yet passing harmless under our bark we knew not how, we rode through the storm with heart and hand, and made a happy port.”
Thus an ancient friendship, shattered by politics, was restored. When Adams answered from Quincy on Monday, February 10, 1812, he was already writing as though the intervening years had been nothing. He asked Jefferson about a pamphlet published in Virginia that predicted the apocalypse was set for June 1812. To Adams it was a wonder that such prophets endured despite the “continual refutation of all their prognostications by time and experience.”
They wrote of history and books and grief; of their families and farming and of their common past. “On the subject of the history of the American revolution, you ask who shall write it?” Jefferson wrote Adams in 1815. “Who can write it? And who ever will be able to write it? Nobody; except merely its external facts. All its councils, designs and discussions, having been conducted by Congress with closed doors, and no member, as far as I know, having even made notes of them. These, which are the life and soul of history, must forever be unknown.”
Adams proved the more prolific correspondent. “So many subjects crowd upon me that I know not with which to begin,” he wrote Jefferson. The second president saw the renewed connection in grand terms. “You and I ought not to die before we have explained ourselves to each other.”
Jefferson loved the letters. “Mr. Adams and myself are in habitual correspondence,” Jefferson wrote Benjamin Rush in March 1813. “I owe him a letter at this time, and shall pay the debt as soon as I have something to write about. For with the commonplace topic of politics, we do not meddle. When there are so many others on which we agree why should we introduce the only one on which we differ?”
Of the vagaries of politics, Adams wrote: “My reputation has been so much the sport of the public for fifty years, and will be with posterity, that I hold it a bubble, a gossamer, that idles in the wanton summer’s air.” Jefferson took the same tone, musing: “The summum bonum with me is now truly Epicurean, ease of body and tranquility of mind; and to these I wish to consign my remaining days,” he wrote Adams in June 1813.
Men have differed in opinion, and been divided into parties by these opinions, from the first origin of societies; and in all governments where they have been permitted freely to think and to speak. The same political parties which now agitate the U.S. have existed through all time. Whether the power of the people, or that of the [best men; nobles] should prevail, were questions which kept the states of Greece and Rome in eternal convulsions.… As we had been longer than most others on the public theatre, and our names therefore were more familiar to our countrymen, the party which considered you as thinking with them, placed your name at their head; the other, for the same reason, selected mine.
It was past time, Jefferson said, for the political wars of the first decades of the republic to end. “And shall you and I, my dear Sir, like Priam of old, gird on the ‘arma, diu desueta, trementibus aevo humeris’? Shall we, at our age, become the Athletae of party, and exhibit ourselves, as gladiators, in the arena of the newspapers? Nothing in the universe could induce me to it. My mind has been long fixed to bow to the judgment of the world, who will judge me by my acts, and will never take counsel from me as to what that judgment should be.”
Adams was gracious but unyielding about their differences of opinion. “I believe in the integrity of both, at least as undoubtingly as in that of Washington,” Adams wrote of Jefferson and Madison. “In the measures of administration I have neither agreed with you or Mr. Madison. Whether you or I were right posterity must judge.” Adams acknowledged that the “nation was with you. But neither your authority nor that of the nation has convinced me. Nor, I am bold to pronounce, will convince posterity.”
Their debates about the nature of democracy and the future of the country were fascinating, and the correspondence forced both men to clarity of thought and a kind of reasonableness. Gone were the pejorative exclamations of partisan days. “The natural aristocracy I consider as the most precious gift of nature, for the instruction, the trusts, and government of society,” wrote Jefferson. “And indeed it would have been inconsistent in creation to have formed man for the social state, and not to have provided virtue and wisdom enough to manage the concerns of the society. May we not even say that that form of government is the best which provides the most effectually for a pure selection of these natural aristoi into the offices of government?” He added:
I have thus stated my opinion on a point on which we differ, not with a view to controversy, for we are both too old to change opinions, which are the result of a long life of inquiry and reflection; but on the suggestion of a former letter of yours that we ought not to die before we have explained ourselves to each other. We acted in perfect harmony through a long and perilous contest for our liberty and independence. A constitution has been acquired which, though neither of us think perfect, yet both consider as competent to render our fellow-citizens the happiest and the securest on whom the sun has ever shone. If we do not think exactly alike as to its imperfections, it matters little to our country which, after devoting to it long lives of disinterested labor, we have delivered over to our successors in life, who will be able to take care of it, and of themselves.
By the time they died in 1826, Jefferson and Adams had exchanged a total of 329 letters in their lifetime, with a substantial number—158—coming from 1812 until the end.
We have had a wretched winter for the farmer,” Jefferson had written Madison in March 1811. It had not been much better for statesmen. “The rancor of party was revived with all its bitterness during the last session of Congress,” his son-in-law John Wayles Eppes wrote Jefferson the same month. “United by no fixed principles or objects and destitute of everything like American feeling, so detestable a minority never existed in any country—Their whole political creed is contained in a single word ‘opposition’—They pursue it without regard to principle, to personal reputation or the best interests of their country.”
From Monticello Jefferson watched as his anxieties of the decades—the fear of British power over America—were realized. Beginning in 1812, the scenario Jefferson had so often warned against came to pass as the United States once more went to war against England. Jefferson had begun his post–President’s House life still believing that Britain could be dealt with short of armed conflict. Yet he advised Madison to rule nothing out. “War however may become a less losing business than unresisted depredation.”
In September 1811, Jefferson wrote John Wayles Eppes that the President and Mrs. Madison as well as the secretaries of war and of the navy were expected at Monticello with their families. News of a British frigate and sloop of war “stationing themselves in the Delaware and refusing to withdraw” might, however, keep the cabinet officers away.
Benjamin Rush saw the whole. “Our country has twice declared itself independent of Great Britain—once in 1776, and again 1800.… Are we upon the eve of a declaration … being repeated a third time, not by the pen, or by a general suffrage but by the mouths of our cannon?”
As war approached Jefferson returned home from Poplar Forest. Rain and hail were damaging the wheat crops—ten inches of rain fell in ten days in May—as Virginians awaited word from Washington. In Jefferson’s mind the conflict with Britain was also with Americans sympathetic to London. “Your declaration of war is expected with perfect calmness; and if those in the North mean systematically to govern the majority it is as good a time for trying them as we can expect,” Jefferson wrote Madison in May 1812.
President Madison sent a war-preparation message to Congress on Tuesday, November 5, 1811. He argued that the depredations along the borders and on the oceans were too much to bear. The time had come to put the question of America’s permanent independence to the test.
“We are to have war then? I believe so and that it is necessary,” Jefferson wrote Charles Cotesworth Pinckney. “Every hope from time, patience and the love of peace is exhausted, and war or abject submission are the only alternatives left us.”
On the last day of 1811, Jefferson offered warm words to Madison. “Your message had all the qualities it should possess, firm, rational, and dignified.… Heaven help you through all your difficulties.”