16. Kenneth Kiple, ed., The Cambridge World History of Human Disease (Cambridge, 1993), 1011.
17. Ibid. Mary J. Dobson, Contours of Death and Disease in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 1997), 270–71. See Charles Leach, "Hospital Rock," Hog River Journal, Winter 2004, on the "Suttonian Method" in the American colonies. The Suttons’ influence also extended into Canada. They had trained "James Latham, a British Military surgeon," who "variolated 303 people, including prominent members of English and French families in Quebec City and, later, in Montreal, without fatality." John W. R. McIntyre and Stuart Houston, "Smallpox and Its Control in Canada," Canadian Medial Association Journal 161 (1999): 1543–47.
18. Virginia Gazette, Sept. 8, 1768, while discussing the events leading up to anti-inoculation riots in Norfolk that sparked a legal case that would involve TJ, referred to "the apparent success of Sutton," as if there were no need to explain to its readers who Sutton was and what he had done.
19. Guenter Risse, "Medicine in the Age of Enlightenment," in Medicine in Society: Historical Essays, ed. Andrew Wear (Cambridge, 1992); Steve Lehrer, Explorers of the Body (Garden City, N.Y., 1979), chap. 8.
20. Voltaire, Lettres philosophiques ("Lettre XI. Sur l’insertion de la petite vérole), Oeuvres complètes de Voltaire, vol. 22, Mélanges I, new ed. (Paris, 1879), 445, chiding the French for their failure to adopt inoculation "est-ce que les Français n’aiment point la vie? est-ce que leurs femmes ne se soucient point de leur beauté?"
21. David Van Zwanenberg, "The Suttons and the Business of Inoculation," Medical History
22. 22 (1978): 71–82. See also Hervé Bazin, The Eradication of Smallpox: Edward Jenner and the First and Only Eradication of an Infectious Disease (London, 2000), 17, saying that the Suttons’ "philanthropy" was not extensive. See, generally, Van Zwanenberg, "Suttons"; MB, 685; J. M. Peebles, Vaccination a Curse and a Menace to Personal Liberty, with Statistics Showing Its Danger and Criminality (Los Angeles, 1913). There is merit to the view that the Suttons’ creative marketing ability and business sense were as much the reason for their fame as their true skill or creativity as innovators. They were good at recognizing what was best about various procedures surrounding inoculation, adopting them, and then aggressively promoting their newly refined method. This takes nothing from their achievements, but it is an old and familiar story; very often it is not the originator of an idea but the one who comes in and refines it and is willing to do what it takes to promote knowledge of the refined product who profits most. See, e.g., Miller, Adoption of Inoculation, 61 n. 53, debunking the claim that the Suttons were the first to use a lancet in inoculation. 22. MB, 685, entry for Nov. 7, 1787.
23. Peebles, Vaccination a Curse, 16.
24. Van Zwanenberg, "Suttons," 81–82 n. 17.
25. R. Hingston Fox, Dr. John Fothergill and His Friends: Chapters in Eighteenth Century Life (London, 1919), 81.
26. Van Zwanenberg, "Suttons," 76 n. 17, 77.
27. Antoine, Louis XV, 991. But see Dorothy Porter and Ray Porter, Patient’s Progress: Doctors and Doctoring in Eighteenth-Century England (Palo Alto, Calif., 1969), 128–29, describing Robert Sutton alone as King Louis’s doctor.
28. MB, 409, 471.
29. Bazin, Eradication of Small Pox, 18 n. 18; Stanton, Free Some Day, 110; Miller, Adoption of Inoculation, 230.
30. Daniel Sutton, The Inoculator; or, Sutton on the System of Inoculation Fully Set Forth in Plain & Familiar Language (London, 1796).
31. Fenn, Pox Americana, 36.
32. Bazin, Eradication of Small Pox, 17.
33. Papers, 6:viii.
34. Frank L. Dewey, Thomas Jefferson: Lawyer (Charlottesville, 1986), 19, 56. TJ had firsthand knowledge of the community stake in the process of inoculation. In 1768 he was involved in the criminal case arising out of the riot that had taken place in Norfolk, Va., when a doctor attempted to keep an inoculated person in a residence instead of the "pest houses" that were specifically set up to shelter people with dangerous diseases. The rioters burned their neighbor’s house to the ground. Jefferson was hired to prosecute the rioters and to defend those who had created the "nuisance" by performing the inoculation in an ordinary neighborhood setting. He won the case. Nine years later, while in the House of Burgesses, he served or a legislative committee that created and helped pass a law "allowing inoculation anywhere if a majority of the neighbors within two miles consented, and if the proper quarantine were maintained." Dewey devotes an entire chapter to TJ’s work on the case, citing it as an example where his position as a public figure merged with his private interest in science and progress.
35. See, generally, Sutton, Inoculator.
36. Ibid., foldout insert at end of the book.
37. Ibid.
38. Fenn, Pox Americana, 34–35. Adams was inoculated along with his brother. The men shared the experience with nine other patients, who he said suffered more than he. When he broke out in the pox, he stopped writing to Abigail, fearful of transmitting any infected material on the pages of his letter. Abigail’s inoculation was far less of an ordeal.
39. Sutton, Inoculator, 80–83.
40. Malone, Jefferson, 1:245.
41. Gordon-Reed, TJ and SH, 245.
42. Yvon Bizardel and Howard C. Rice Jr., "Poor in Love Mr. Short," WMQ, 3d ser., 21 (1963): 516–33, esp. 517–18.
11: The Rhythms of the City
1. Howard C. Rice, L’Hôtel de Langeac: Jefferson’s Paris Residence, 1785–1789 (Paris, 1947), 7–8. See TJ to James Madison, Sept. 25, 1788, in Papers, 12:202, discussing the expectation that he would maintain the same "stile of living" that Franklin had established and that his governmental allowance gave him "500 guineas a year less to do it."
2. Rice, Hôtel de Langeac, 8, 13–14.
3. Ibid., 11, 13; McLaughlin, Jefferson and Monticello, 211.
4. Malone, Jefferson, 2:20; MB, 674 n. 83
5. Eugene Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York, 1972), 328–65; John W. Blassingame, "Status and Social Structure in the Slave Community: Evidence from New Sources," Perspectives and Irony in American Slavery, ed. Harry P. Owens (Jackson, Miss., 1976); Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, 353–58. See, generally, Stephanie M. H. Camp, "The Pleasures of Resistance: Enslaved Woman in the Plantation South," Journal of Southern History 68 (2002): 3, recounting enslaved men’s and women’s efforts to create a space for themselves "away from slaveholding eyes" where they could be themselves among their own.
6. Farm Book, 77. Stanton, Free Some Day, 106,
7. Stanton, Free Some Day, 151.
8. Marie de Botidoux to Martha Jefferson, Nov. 1789–Jan. 10, 1790, Special Collections, ViU.
9. Maria Jefferson to Kitty Church, May 7, 1789, Papers, 16:xxxi.
10. Fairchilds, Domestic Enemies, 54–58, 68–69.
11. David Garrioch, The Formation of the Parisian Bourgeoisie, 1690–1830 (Cambridge, Mass., 1996), 309–10.
12. See photograph in first insert.
13. Martha Jefferson to Eliza House Trist, in Papers, 8:437.
14. Garrioch, Making of Revolutionary Paris, 22; Alistair Horne, Seven Ages of Paris (New York, 2002); Colin Jones, Paris, Biography of a City (London, 2004);
15. TJ to Montmorin, July 8, 1789, Papers, 15:260.
16. Garrioch, Making of Revolutionary Paris, 23.
17. Ibid.
18. McLaughlin, Jefferson and Monticello, 211.
19. Eugen Weber, My France: Politics, Culture, Myth (Cambridge, Mass., 1991), 93.
20. Fairchilds, Domestic Enemies, 105–6, notes "the difficulties faced with language" and describes how the stereotype of the inarticulate servant formed the basis of many comic scenes in plays and the literature of the day.
21. Petit to TJ, Aug. 3, 1790, Papers, 17:298; Petit to TJ, July 28, 1792, ibid., 24:262.
22. Fairchilds, Domestic Enemies, 50–51. Despite the government’s geopolitical contests, "‘À l’anglaise’ was the fashion in the Parisian beau monde."
23. Fr
om Perrault, Papers, 14:426.
24. Rice, Hôtel de Langeac, 10, 13.
25. MB, 690.
26. Ibid., 718; Fairchild, Domestic Enemies, 54–58; MB, 730 n. 47.
27. MB, 686 n. 20.
28. TJ to Martha Jefferson Randolph, March 28, 1787, Papers, 11:251.
29. Pierson, Jefferson at Monticello, 107.
30. See, generally, Sabattier, Figaro et son maître; Gutton, Domestiques et serviteurs; Fairchild, Domestic Enemies; Maza, Servants and Masters, on wage rates and positions.
31. Gordon-Reed, TJ and SH, 248.
32. See Maza, Servants and Masters, 110–11, on prejudices against female servants.
33. Virginia Cope, "‘Verily Believed Myself to Be a Free Woman’: Harriet Jacobs’s Journey into Capitalism," African American Review 38 (2004): 5–20.
34. Fairchild, Domestic Enemies, 54–58.
35. Ibid., 56–58, wage tables; Pierre Boulle, "Les Gens de couleur à Paris à la veille de la Révolution," 162–63.
36. Bear, The Hemings Family, 9.
37. Mary Jefferson to Thomas Mann Randolph, Oct. (?), 1790, LOC 11992. This letter was more likely written at the beginning of Sept., as both parties were at Monticello during the end of Sept. and entire month of Oct.
38. Martha Randolph’s will, April 18, 1834, Family Letters Project.
39. Brodie, Thomas Jefferson, 234.
40. Francis D. Cogliano, Thomas Jefferson: Reputation and Legacy (Charlottesville, 2006), 74–105.
41. Gordon-Reed, TJ and SH, chap. 3.
42. MB, 731, entry for April 29, 1789.
43. Brodie, Thomas Jefferson, 233.
44. MB, 716, entry for Oct. 7, 1788.
45. Stanton, Free Some Day, 109.
46. TJ to James Madison, Jan. 13, 1821, Republic of Letters, 3:1828.
47. TJ to William Short, Jan. 22, 1788, Papers, 15:483.
48. Martha Jefferson Randolph to Ann (Nancy) Cary Randolph Morris, May 26, 1827, Family Letters Project.
49. R. Premaratna et al., "Acute Hearing Loss Due to Scrub Typhus: A Forgotton Complication of a Reemerging Disease," Clinical Infectious Diseases 42 (2006): e6–e8.
50. Scholars have speculated that a bout with typhus caused Beethoven’s deafness. Tony Miksanek, "Diagnosing a Genius: The Life and Death of Beethoven," Journal of the American Medical Association 297 (2007): 2643–44.
51. Ellen Randolph Coolidge to Joseph Coolidge, Oct. 24, 1858, Family Letters Project. See also Gordon-Reed, TJ and SH, 259. Readers should note that there was an error in the transcription of this letter in the earliest editions of the book that was corrected in later printings. It formed no part of my analysis and discussion in the main text. The full letter itself appeared only in the appendix to the work. The relevant passage is the quoted material in the text to which this endnote refers. I devoted a chapter (pp. 78–104) of my book to TJ’s grandchildren’s alternative vision of life at Monticello. Without rehashing that discussion, a couple of things are worth mentioning.
In my first take, I focused primarily on what I thought, and still think, was the most important information conveyed in Coolidge’s account: that Samuel Carr had fathered all of SH’s children. My analysis at the time (later borne out by DNA tests on descendants) made clear to me that Coolidge’s statement was untrue. Coolidge’s letter nevertheless remains important because the DNA results reveal the level of desperation that TJ’s white family felt about his relationship with SH—that they would resort to picking relatives to name as her lover. As I think of it now, the passage in which Coolidge claimed that no female slave had ever gone into TJ’s room when he was there and that anyone who went into his room would have been seen by others also lays bare their anxiety. It is just the kind of "never" or "always" formulation that should provoke skepticism.
Coolidge was presenting herself as an eyewitness to SH’s access to her grandfather, offering that because she lived at Monticello (and was a legal descendant and thus had the right to tell the "official" family story), she could be trusted to know that they were never alone in his room. That it was impossible for her to have known that struck me then, and strikes me now, as patently obvious. Unless she was physically attached to him or SH, it was not humanly possible for Coolidge, or anyone else besides TJ and SH, to know whether they were ever alone in a room together over the near two decades that the pair was having children together. Coolidge was a contemporary of SH’s children, the first two of whom were conceived before she was born and the others when she was an infant or a child herself. She could not possibly have known whether SH was in TJ’s room or not when those children were conceived. Coolidge and her siblings spent large amounts of time at Monticello during their childhoods, moving there permanently in 1809 after all SH’s children were born. By the time the last child, Eston, whose descendant was the subject of the DNA test, was conceived in 1807, Coolidge was at least old enough—eleven—to be observant of her world. Coolidge did not, as an eleven-year-old girl, spend her time running back and forth between the outside and interior entrances to her grandfather’s bedroom twenty-four hours a day making sure that no one went inside. For that is what she would have to do in order to know the thing she said she knew and reconstruct, at age sixty-two, the memory of her eleven-year-old self having done that impossible thing. Nor would TJ’s guests—who were nowhere near as numerous during his preretirement years, the period when SH was conceiving her children—be standing by the indoor and outdoor entrances to TJ’s bedroom morning, noon, and night, watching to see whether anyone went inside.
52. Gordon-Reed, TJ and SH, 259.
12: The Eve of Revolution
1. I’ve borrowed this image from Carlyle, The French Revolution, 59, describing the fiscal policy of "Comptroller Calonne."
2. See Doyle, Origins, 45–53.
3. Ibid.
4. TJ to Abigail Adams, Feb. 22, 1787, Papers, 11:174; TJ to James Monroe, Aug. 9, 1788, ibid., 8:489.
5. Doyle, Origins, 76–90; Lefebvre, The Coming of the French Revolution, 102–9.
6. TJ to Anne Willing Bingham, May 11, 1788, Papers, 8:151.
7. Garrioch, The Making of Revolutionary Paris, 291: "In the last years of Louis XV’s reign and under Louis XVI there was a growing condemnation of ‘despotism,’ even though the government was more responsive to ‘public opinion’ than ever before." See also Doyle, Origins.
8. See Robin Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776–1848 (London, 1988), 173–75; Dubois, A Colony of Citizens, 99–104, discussing the effort to allow gens de couleur a measure of representation in the National Assembly.
9. Mirabeau quoted in Dubois, Colony of Citizens, 99–100. See also his useful "Chronology" at the end of the book. See, generally, Shelby T. McCoy, "Further Notes on Negroes and Mulattoes in Eighteenth-Century France," Journal of Negro History 39 (Oct. 1954): 284–97.
10. Malone, Jefferson, 2:221; Dubois, Colony of Citizens, 100.
11. TJ to Maria Cosway, Oct. 12, 1786, Papers, 10:443. TJ and Cosway have been written about in numerous works. Perhaps the best treatment of the story is in Brodie, Thomas Jefferson, 199–215. Although at times she makes too much of the couple’s dealings when Cosway returned to Paris after a time in London after their initial meeting, Brodie’s informed depiction of the romantic mores of ancien régime Paris, and TJ’s response to it, is nuanced, insightful, and lively—even when she overreaches. See also Marie Kimball, Jefferson: The Scene of Europe, 1784 to 1789 (New York, 1950), 168–69; Malone, Jefferson, 2:70–78; Burstein, The Inner Jefferson, 75–99; John P. Kaminski, ed., Jefferson in Love: The Love Letters between Thomas Jefferson and Maria Cosway (Madison, Wis., 1999).
12. When he was in his twenties, TJ propositioned—she claimed repeatedly—Elizabeth (Betsey) Walker, the wife of one of his best friends, John Walker. Walker’s father, Thomas, had been TJ’s guardian after Peter Jefferson’s death. The younger men became like brothers, with TJ standing as a groomsman at his friend’s wedding and acting as godfather to his chi
ld. When Walker found out about TJ’s actions many years later, a duel was only narrowly averted when mutual friends of the two men acted as intermediaries in intense negotiations to resolve the dispute; it was an intervention perfectly in keeping with the tightly knit world of upper-class communities in eighteenth-century Virginia. Some years after the resolution, in the early 1800s, TJ and Walker achieved a rapprochement of sorts, with TJ making small gestures at the right moment that seemed designed to show that he was genuinely sorry about what had happened. Walker accepted them. See Malone, Jefferson, vol. 4, appendix "The Walker Affair"; Brodie, Thomas Jefferson, 57, 79; Gordon-Reed, TJ and SH, 141–46.
13. Brodie, Thomas Jefferson, 225, 253; Gordon-Reed, TJ and SH, 187; D. S. Neff, "Bitches, Mollies, and Tommies: Byron, Maculinity, and the History of Sexualities," Journal of the History of Sexuality 11 (2002): 431. Neff argues that Byron understood that "castrati and eunuchs had a very real proclivity for heterophilic and homophilic sexual attachments." The poet claimed that "Italian women preferred castrati ‘for two reasons—first they do not impregnate them—and next as they never…spend—they go on "in eterno" and serve an elderly lady at all times.’" See also n. 136, citing Angus Heriot, The Castrati in Opera (London, 1956), confirming castrati’s status as "lady-killers" who were in demand because "their embraces could not lead to awkward consequences."
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