FORTY-TWO
From the Battle of Bunker’s Hill to the Treaty of Paris we never had so ominous a question.
—THOMAS JEFFERSON, on the admission of Missouri to the Union
JEFFERSON LIKED TO THINK WELL of the future. It suited the prevailing nature of his temperament. He knew, too, that the public preferred a promise of progress rather than reversal, of light rather than dark. “I have much confidence that we shall proceed successfully for ages to come,” he wrote the Marquis de Barbé-Marbois in 1817. “My hope of its duration is built much on the enlargement of the resources of life going hand in hand with the enlargement of territory.”
On Friday, December 10, 1819, Jefferson took note of a debate in Congress with vast implications: the conditions under which Missouri would be added to the Union. The House voted for admission only if antislavery provisions were part of the agreement; the Senate, where slave states held more sway, refused to go along.
From the Constitutional Convention through the Louisiana Purchase, the Northeast had feared that an expanding slaveholding South and West would give the slave interests permanent control over the country. At the same time, the South and West feared for the future of slavery.
To Jefferson it was the worst of hours. He knew slavery was a moral wrong and believed it would ultimately be abolished. He could not, however, bring himself to work for emancipation. As a politician he understood that sectional tensions represented the greatest threat to the union. In his own public career, they already had threatened it in the secessionist movements in the Northeast over the Louisiana Purchase and, later, over the embargo.
Yet slavery was a higher order of problem. Missouri, Jefferson said, was “like a fire bell in the night … the knell of the Union.” He added: “A geographical line, coinciding with a marked principle, moral and political, once conceived and held up to the angry passions of men, will never be obliterated; and every new irritation will mark it deeper and deeper.”
By his own admission, Jefferson’s solution for the problem of slavery was too complex to be executed. “The cession of that kind of property, for so it is misnamed, is a bagatelle which would not cost me a second thought, if, in that way, a general emancipation and expatriation could be effected: and, gradually, and with due sacrifices, I think it might be,” he wrote. “But, as it is, we have the wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other.”
To John Adams, Jefferson was candid about his anxieties. “The banks, bankrupt law, manufactures, Spanish treaty, are nothing,” he wrote in December. “These are occurrences which, like waves in a storm, will pass under the ship. But the Missouri question is a breaker on which we lose the Missouri country by revolt, and what more, God only knows.”
The resolution was a compromise. Slavery was to be allowed below the 36th parallel but other than in Missouri itself it was forbidden any farther north. Fugitive slaves were to be returned to their owners in the event of escape into the free regions.
Jefferson saw the issue in terms of power. If the federal government began regulating slavery within the states, then a precedent would be established, for regulation could finally lead to abolition.
He believed, too, the North was trying to create new free states that would strengthen the national hand of the antislavery interest, possibly giving free states a lock on the electoral college. “It is not a moral question, but one merely of power,” he wrote Lafayette. “Its object is to raise a geographical principle for the choice of a president, and the noise will be kept up till that is effected.”
The terms in which he thought and spoke of the Missouri matter suggest the depth of his feeling about it. Jefferson linked the question to one that had driven him for so long: that of the threat of monarchy. “The leaders of Federalism, defeated in their schemes of obtaining power by rallying partisans to the principle of monarchism … have changed their tack,” he said, and were now attempting to build political support by appealing to antislavery sentiment.
In the end Jefferson could see slavery only as tragedy. He may have believed it to be “a hideous blot,” as he wrote in September 1823, but it was not a blot he felt capable of erasing. The man who believed in the acquisition and wielding of power—political power, intellectual power, domestic power, and mastering life from the fundamental definition of human liberty in the modern world down to the smallest details of the wine he served and the flowers he planted—chose to consider himself powerless over the central economic and social fact of his life.
Writing to a correspondent who asked him to devise a way to free the slaves of Virginia, Jefferson demurred. “This, my dear sir,” Jefferson said, “is like bidding old Priam to buckle the armor of Hector.… This enterprise is for the young.… It shall have all my prayers, and these are the only weapons of an old man.”
Slavery was the rare subject where Jefferson’s sense of realism kept him from marshaling his sense of hope in the service of the cause of reform. “There is nothing I would not sacrifice to a practicable plan of abolishing every vestige of this moral and political depravity,” he wrote in 1814, but that was not true. He was not willing to sacrifice his own way of life, though he characteristically left himself a rhetorical escape by introducing the subjective standard of practicability.
By his lights nothing other than a removal of blacks from the established United States would work—a removal that would have dwarfed even the removal of Indians from what was understood by Jefferson and so many of his contemporaries to be white America. Indians were to be unjustly driven across the Mississippi. Blacks would have to be dispatched not across a river but an ocean. “Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people are to be free. Nor is it less certain that the two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government.”
A multiracial society was beyond his imagination, except it was not beyond his experience, since he had created just such a society at Monticello. Mixed-race children such as those he had with Sally Hemings—children whom he saw every day, in his house, alongside his white family—suffered, in his general view, from an intrinsic “degradation” produced by the “amalgamation” of white and black.
How is it possible to explain the disorienting contradiction between his harsh views of “amalgamation” and his own paternity of such children? Perhaps Jefferson felt, as he often did, that if he were in control—which he was, in his eclectic domestic sphere—then he would be able to keep matters in hand. He felt this way about his debts, and he had felt this way about the country writ large when he was seeking and held the presidency. The human products of “amalgamation,” to use his term, were thought to be sources of chaos in the world beyond his own mountain. In his domain, though, he could have convinced himself that his centrality made Monticello the exception to what he supposed to be the rule in other realms.
Rendering moral judgments in retrospect can be hazardous. It is unfair to judge the past by the standards of the present. Yet we can assess a man’s views on a moral issue—which slavery unquestionably was—by what others in the same age and facing the same realities thought and did. Beginning with Robert Carter, the planter who freed his slaves in 1791, some Virginians of Jefferson’s class recognized that the blight of slavery had to go and did what was within their power by emancipating their slaves.
More broadly, the politicians of the North were steadily creating a climate in which antislavery rhetoric and sentiment could take root and thrive. The very fact of the debate over Missouri suggested that the antislavery forces were gathering strength—and were willing to use it. As important for a sophisticate such as Jefferson was the French view of the institution. He had lived in that world, and had presumably feared that the Hemingses, and particularly Sally Hemings, might have successfully sought their freedom while in France.
So it is not as though Jefferson lived in a time or in places where abolition was the remotest or most fanciful of prospects. It had not only been thought of but had been brought into being in his lifetime in lands he knew intimately. Jefferson was wrong about slavery, his attempts at reform at the beginning of his public life notwithstanding.
Here again, though, and in dramatic relief, we see that Jefferson the practical politician was a more powerful persona than Jefferson the moral theorist. He was driven by what he had once called, in a 1795 letter to Madison, “the Southern interest,” for the South was his personal home and his political base. He could not see a pragmatic way out of the conundrum, so he did what politicians often do: He suggested that the problem would be handled in the fullness of time—just not now. He did not believe full-scale colonization was feasible. “I do not say this to induce an inference that the getting rid of them is forever impossible,” he wrote in 1824. “For that is neither my opinion nor my hope. But only that it cannot be done in this way.”
Could it be done in any way? Jefferson did not know. “Where the disease is most deeply seated, there it will be slowest in eradication,” he wrote in 1815, a point that reflects the sensibility of—as well as the sensitivities of—a vote counter accustomed to seeking popular approval for proposed courses of action.
“The march of events has not been such as to render its completion practicable within the limits of time allotted to me; and I leave its accomplishment as the work of another generation,” Jefferson wrote the reformer Frances Wright in 1825. “And I am cheered when I see that.… The abolition of the evil is not impossible: it ought never therefore to be despaired of. Every plan should be adopted, every experiment tried, which may do something towards the ultimate object.”
They just were not to be experiments he could undertake—an extremely rare case of the innovative, ever curious, inventive Jefferson refusing to engage in work he knew to be essential. And so he did what he almost never did: He gave up.
Personal debt was another enduring irony of Jefferson’s life. Planters of his time and place were often land rich and cash poor, borrowing heavily against their farms, their slaves, and their prospective crops. The need for ready money drove Jefferson, his father, and many of their contemporaries into the growing of tobacco, a cash crop that exhausted the soil but tended to command a greater price at market than wheat or other grains. As such, when tobacco was high, the Virginians made money; when tobacco was low, Virginians muddled along or lost money, depleting their land no matter how much cash came in. Thomas Jefferson tried to move away from tobacco at Monticello when he returned to Virginia in 1794, but he always grew the crop on his more distant plantations.
A confluence of factors kept Jefferson in debt. There was the gentry culture of his time. There were promissory notes to be signed for friends and family members. Most of all, there was the inherited debt. In an effort to pay it down, he sold inherited property worth £4,000, but skyrocketing inflation during the Revolutionary War made what was owed him under the land agreements worth “but a shadow”—while the debt remained, with the spiraling effect of accumulating interest.
Why would Jefferson, a man who sought power over men and events, concede his power to creditors and continue to incur debts when he was already so burdened? Part of the explanation may lie in his tendency, as he put it, to take things “by the smooth handle” and avoid difficult personal choices. It was always easier, it seemed, to sign another note and defer payment to another day, than it was to face a stark financial reckoning. Oddly, too, his innate sense of control and place may have enabled him to see debt as an abstract problem rather than a concrete one. He was part of a family and class in which borrowing money and mortgaging lands was as much a part of the culture as hospitality or hunting. The prospect of ruin was real but in Jefferson’s mind remote—or at least remote enough for him to allow his essential sense of security about his standing in society to trump fiscal discipline. Ironically, then, Jefferson’s feeling of power in general led him to sacrifice his power—and his family’s future—in particular. As with slavery, Jefferson’s capacity to live with contradiction was nothing less than epic.
The Missouri question made Jefferson even more eager to get on with the building of the University of Virginia, for he believed the rising generation of leaders should be trained at home, in climes hospitable to his view of the world, rather than sent north.
His had been a largely comfortable old age, particularly given the circumstances of the time. In his late seventies he was thought by a friend to look “as well as he did 10 years ago.”
That began to change in the 1820s. His wrist, injured in Paris in the late 1780s, grew worse, and he became ever more elegiac as the first years of the 1820s passed. Worried about Missouri, his wrist aching, he wrote to Adams on the first day of June 1822: “The papers tell us General Stark is off at the age of 93. Charles Thomson still lives at about the same age, cheerful, slender as a grasshopper, and so much without memory that he scarcely recognizes the members of his household. An intimate friend of his called on him not long since; it was difficult to make him recollect who he was, and, sitting one hour, he told him the same story four times over. Is this life? … It is at most but the life of a cabbage; surely not worth a wish.”
One day toward the end of 1822 he put a foot wrong at Monticello. A step down from a terrace gave way under his weight. He collapsed, struck the ground, and broke his left arm. It healed fairly well, but now both his right and left hands had been significantly injured. “During summer I enjoy its temperature,” Jefferson said, “but I shudder at the approach of winter, and wish I could sleep through it with the dormouse, and only wake with him in spring, if ever.”
Jefferson had few doubts about his generation’s place in history. In a letter to John Adams introducing his grandson Thomas Jefferson Randolph, Jefferson said: “Like other young people he wishes to be able, in the winter nights of old age, to recount to those around him what he has heard and learnt of the Heroic age preceding his birth, and which of the Argonauts particularly he was in time to have seen.”
But he did worry about how history would treat the times in which he had lived and led. “We have been too careless of our future reputation, while our Tories will omit nothing to place us in the wrong,” he wrote Supreme Court justice William Johnson of South Carolina in 1823. Jefferson was contemptuous of John Marshall’s five-volume biography of George Washington, which he believed Federalist propaganda, and as the years went by he worried about works on Alexander Hamilton and on John Adams.
Besides the five-volumed libel which represents us as struggling for office, and not at all to prevent our government from being administered into a monarchy, the life of Hamilton is in the hands of a man who, to the bitterness of the priest, adds the rancor of the fiercest Federalism. Mr. Adams’ papers, too, and his biography, will descend of course to his son, whose pen, you know, is pointed, and his prejudices not in our favor. And doubtless other things are in preparation, unknown to us. On our part we are depending on truth to make itself known, while history is taking a contrary set which may become too inveterate for correction.
As he continued to grow older, he refused to surrender his independence. He would do as he wished. In May 1823, Jefferson was on his solitary daily ride. Crossing the Rivanna, his horse became “mired in the river,” a granddaughter wrote, and Jefferson, his legs tangled, fell into the current. His family was horrified, worrying that “he would inevitably have been drowned had not the rapidity of the current carried him down to a much shallower place, where by reaching the bottom of the river with his hand he was enabled to rise on his feet and get out.” He got soaked and his arm wound up in a sling, but he refused to accede to family demands that he give up his solitary rides. He had just turned eighty.
In October 1823 he answered a letter of President Monroe’s seeking counsel on whether the United States should join with England to oppose Spanish efforts to retain Madrid’s South American colonies, which were in revolt. The real issue, Jefferson replied, was more general than particular: How should the United States think of European adventurism in its hemisphere?
“The question presented by the letters you have sent me is the most momentous which has ever been offered to my contemplation since that of Independence,” Jefferson wrote Monroe. “Our first and fundamental maxim should be, never to entangle ourselves in the broils of Europe. Our second—never to suffer Europe to intermeddle with [cross]-Atlantic affairs. America, North and South, has a set of interests distinct from those of Europe, and peculiarly her own.”
The doctrine that bears Monroe’s name—that the United States opposes all European intervention in the Western Hemisphere—owes much to the work of Monroe’s secretary of state, John Quincy Adams, who was instrumental in the formulation of the policy. But it was also at least partly of Jeffersonian inspiration. In Jefferson’s case, it was fitting that a man who had spent his life in pursuit of control would extend it as far as he could in the service of his nation, leaving a kind of last declaration of independence. This time it was a matter of policy, not of revolution. It was a declaration all the same.
In the 1824 presidential election, Jefferson saw anew that the Founders’ dream of the end of party was still a dream, something that might come true in the future but surely not in the present. Writing Lafayette, Jefferson said, “You are not to believe that these two parties are amalgamated, that the lion and the lamb are lying down together. The Hartford Convention, the victory of Orleans, the peace of Ghent, prostrated the name of Federalism. Its votaries abandoned it through shame and mortification; and now call themselves Republicans. But the name alone is changed, the principles are the same.”
The presidential field was unusually large in 1824. There was John Quincy Adams of Massachusetts; Henry Clay of Kentucky; John C. Calhoun of South Carolina; William Crawford of Georgia; and Andrew Jackson of Tennessee. The race in part represented a generational shift. Jackson had been born the year Jefferson began his law practice and had been a fourteen-year-old prisoner of war in 1781, the year Jefferson escaped from Tarleton at Monticello.
Jefferson favored Crawford, a veteran of Madison’s and Monroe’s cabinets. The Georgian suffered a stroke in late 1823, however, and the election was ultimately decided in the House of Representatives in February 1825. Though Jackson won the most popular votes, Adams was chosen in the House after Clay, who was to become Adams’s secretary of state, gave his support to Adams. (Jackson’s charges of a “corrupt bargain” would fuel his own ambitions to avenge his defeat in 1828, which he did.)
Arriving at Monticello in a procession of trumpets and banners, Lafayette stepped out of his carriage on a brilliant autumn day in November 1824 at the East Front of the house. Lafayette, now sixty-seven years old, had come to America for a triumphant farewell tour, a living monument (like Adams and Jefferson) to days that seemed ever more glorious and distant.
Finally stooped with age in his eighty-first year, Jefferson walked toward his guest. They embraced without embarrassment, two old revolutionaries who had seen the best and the worst of their times and of their countries.
“My dear Jefferson!” said the guest.
“My dear Lafayette!” replied the host.
They had not laid eyes on each other for more than thirty years, and Jefferson was graciously determined to honor Lafayette not only for the Frenchman’s services to the Revolutionary cause but to the cause of the young nation during Jefferson’s years in France.
At a banquet in Lafayette’s honor in Charlottesville, Jefferson drafted a toast to be read:
His deeds in the war of independence you have heard and read. They are known to you and embalmed in your memories, and in the pages of faithful history. His deeds in the peace which followed that war are perhaps not known to you; but I can attest them. When I was stationed in his country … [h]e made our cause his own.… His influence and connections there were great. All doors of all departments were open to him at all times; to me, only formally and at appointed times. In truth, I only held the nail, he drove it. Honor him, then, as your benefactor in peace, as well as in war.
There was a benedictory quality to Jefferson’s toast, a broader message to his countrymen there and far beyond, for he knew his words would be published and read everywhere.
Born and bred among your fathers, led by their partiality into the line of public life, I labored in fellowship with them through that arduous struggle which, freeing us from foreign bondage, established us in the rights of self-government; rights which have blessed ourselves, and will bless, in their sequence, all the nations of the earth.
In a particular place, a universal theme: In old age Jefferson was the Jefferson of youth, a man who honored the work of politics, the comradeship of service, and the ideas that drove flawed men to fight for causes larger than themselves.
As Jefferson aged he retained his conversational skill of speaking of topics of special interest to his companion of the moment. When those were exhausted, he would muse widely about the past and the future. He was always gracious. “In conversation, Mr. Jefferson is easy and natural, and apparently not ambitious; it is not loud, as challenging general attention, but usually addressed to the person next to him,” Daniel Webster wrote of an 1824 stay at Monticello. Jefferson spoke of “science and letters, and especially the University of Virginia, which is coming into existence almost entirely from his exertions.… When we were with him, his favorite subjects were Greek and Anglo-Saxon, historical recollections of the times and events of the Revolution, and of his residence in France from 1783–4 to 1789.”
A New Englander, Webster was unhappy about the rise of Andrew Jackson in the West. Jefferson apparently shared at least some of Webster’s fears. “I feel much alarmed at the prospect of seeing General Jackson President,” Jefferson said, according to Webster. “He is one of the most unfit men I know of for such a place. He has had very little respect for laws or constitutions, and is, in fact, an able military chief. His passions are terrible.”
On reading Webster’s account, the biographer Henry Randall wondered about its accuracy, and put the question to a grandchild, who replied:
I cannot pretend to know what my grandfather said to Mr. Webster, nor can I believe Mr. Webster capable of misstatement. Still I think the copy of the portrait incorrect, as throwing out all the lights and giving only the shadows. I have heard my grandfather speak with great admiration of General Jackson’s military talent. If he called him a “dangerous man,” “unfit for the place” to which the nation eventually called him, I think it must have been entirely with reference to his general idea that a military chieftain was no proper head for a peaceful republic as ours was in those days.… He did not like to see the people run away with ideas of military glory.
As always, Jefferson was in significant debt, yet he had, as a favor to a friend, cosigned a note for $20,000 for Virginia governor Wilson Cary Nicholas in 1819. It was the act of a gentleman and a kinsman: a Nicholas daughter had married a Jefferson grandson.
Nicholas was forced to default on the note, leaving the former president responsible for the debt. On the granddaughter-in-law’s first call at Monticello since news of the disaster, Jefferson took care to seek her out. Abashed and horrified by the news, she was unsure how to conduct herself around Jefferson. When he emerged from his rooms, he immediately called for her. “She heard his voice and flew to meet him,” Henry Randall wrote. “Instead of the usual hearty hand-shake and kiss, he folded her in his arms. His smile was radiant.” At dinner he spoke with her with great grace; the shame the young woman had felt disappeared. “Neither then nor on any subsequent occasion,” wrote Randall, “did he ever by a word or look make her aware that he was even conscious of the misfortune her father had brought upon him.”
Governor Nicholas himself lived along the route Jefferson traveled to Poplar Forest, and Jefferson knew he could not fail to call on him. “I ought not to stop; I have not time; but it would be cruel to pass him,” Jefferson said to a family member as they turned off the road toward Nicholas’s place. Meeting his old friend, Jefferson behaved perfectly. “He showed no depression, and did not make an equal exposure of his feelings by feigning extraordinary cheerfulness,” wrote Randall. For the rest of Nicholas’s life, Jefferson treated him as though nothing had happened. A busybody lady once spoke meanly of Nicholas in Jefferson’s presence at Monticello, and the former president cut her off politely but firmly. He had, he told her, “the highest opinion of Governor Nicholas, and felt the deepest sympathy for his misfortunes.” Such was the private character of the man whose public enemies accused him of selfishness, duplicity, inordinate ambition, and cold-bloodedness.
The debilitating burden of debt facing Jefferson forced him to do what he liked least in the world: put himself in the hands of others. The market was bad, and so traditional routes of raising capital—finding buyers for his land—were out. Then inspiration struck. He had been, Patsy said, “lying awake one night from painful thoughts” when he conceived the notion of holding a lottery. In an appeal to the General Assembly of Virginia, he sought permission to sell tickets in exchange for chances at his lands, mills, and—to his horror—Monticello itself, if his debts were to be retired. However devastating to his pride this would be, he had no other choice. His grandson Thomas Jefferson Randolph was in charge of the arrangements.
The former president was in a valedictory frame of mind. Asked to send counsel to a young namesake, he composed a significantly longer letter than he tended to write at this point. The subject engaged him, however, and always had: How to live a virtuous life? “Adore God,” he wrote. “Reverence and cherish your parents. Love your neighbor as yourself, and your country more than yourself. Be just. Be true. Murmur not at the ways of Providence. So shall the life into which you have entered be the portal to one of eternal and ineffable bliss.”
There was more: a paraphrased version of Psalm 15.
THE PORTRAIT OF A GOOD MAN BY THE MOST SUBLIME OF POETS, FOR YOUR IMITATION.
Lord, who’s the happy man that may to thy blest courts repair;
Not stranger-like to visit them, but to inhabit there?
’Tis he whose every thought and deed by rules of virtue moves;
Whose generous tongue disdains to speak the thing his heart disproves.
Who never did a slander forge, his neighbor’s fame to wound;
Nor hearken to a false report, by malice whispered round.
Who vice in all its pomp and power, can treat with just neglect;
And piety, though clothed in rags, religiously respect.
Who to his plighted vows and trust has ever firmly stood;
And though he promise to his loss, he makes his promise good.
Whose soul in usury disdains his treasure to employ;
Whom no rewards can ever bribe the guiltless to destroy.
The man who by this steady course has happiness insur’d,
When earth’s foundations shake, shall stand, by Providence secur’d.
And there was yet more.
A DECALOGUE OF CANONS FOR OBSERVATION IN PRACTICAL LIFE.
1. Never put off till tomorrow what you can do today.
2. Never trouble another for what you can do yourself.
3. Never spend your money before you have it.
4. Never buy what you do not want, because it is cheap; it will be dear to you.
5. Pride costs us more than hunger, thirst, and cold.
6. We never repent of having eaten too little.
7. Nothing is troublesome that we do willingly.
8. How much pain have cost us the evils which have never happened.
9. Take things always by their smooth handle.
10. When angry, count ten, before you speak; if very angry, a hundred.
In a bizarre episode in his last years, history almost killed him. A New York artist arrived at Monticello to take a plaster cast of Jefferson’s face—a life mask. Something went wrong, however, and the plaster almost suffocated him; only by banging a chair next to the sofa on which he lay did Jefferson manage to alert his butler Burwell Colbert to his plight. His life was saved, as his life had been shaped, by the act of a slave.
Musing about abolition—and presumably repatriation—in the fading spring, he wrote: “The revolution in public opinion which this cause requires, is not to be expected in a day, or perhaps in an age; but time, which outlives all things, will outlive this evil also.”
His health had been deteriorating since the first day of 1826. “It is now three weeks since a re-ascerbation of my painful complaint [a severe attack of diarrhea] has confined me to the house and indeed my couch,” Jefferson wrote a friend in Richmond on January 1, 1826. “Required to be constantly recumbent I write slowly and with difficulty.… Weakened in body by infirmities and in mind by age, now far gone into my 83rd year, reading one newspaper only and forgetting immediately what I read.” Still, he refused to give up riding, even though he had to mount his horse Eagle by putting the horse on a terrace below and lowering himself into the saddle.
With the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence coming in the summer of 1826, organizers of the Washington celebrations were eager to bring Jefferson back to the capital for the day. He was too ill to consider it, but in his sun-filled cabinet he drafted a letter to commemorate the occasion. “All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man,” he wrote. “The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God. These are grounds of hope for others. For ourselves, let the annual return of this day forever refresh our recollections of these rights, and an undiminished devotion to them.”
These were to be his last words to the nation he had helped found, and which he had led through so much for. His farewell to Madison, his friend of half a century, was more personal but as heartfelt. “Take care of me when dead,” Jefferson asked in a letter to his old friend in February.
Still, he was not expecting an imminent death. After dispatching his letter about liberty to the Fourth of July commemoration in Washington, Jefferson wrote another on a different passion: wine, making arrangements to pay the customs collector at Baltimore the tax on an incoming shipment.
He would not live to drink it. Soon Jefferson was confined to his bed. He continued to read, browsing through the Bible, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, musing on the great tragedians as time and illness finally caught up with him in the last days of June.
The end was at hand.