Given Chastellux’s effusive praise, Jefferson’s reaction is understandable. Addressing his readers, Chastellux wrote:
Let me describe to you a man, not yet forty, tall, and with a mild and pleasing countenance, but whose mind and attainments could serve in lieu of all outward graces; an American, who, without ever having quitted his own country, is Musician, Draftsman, Surveyor, Astronomer, Natural Philosopher, Jurist, and Statesman; a Senator of America, who sat for two years in that famous Congress which brought about the Revolution and which is never spoken of here without respect—though with a respect unfortunately mingled with too many misgivings; a Governor of Virginia, who filled this difficult station during the invasions of Arnold, Philips, and Cornwallis; and finally a Philosopher, retired from the world and public business, because the temper of his fellow citizens is not as yet prepared either to face the truth or to suffer contradictions. A gentle and amiable wife, charming children whose education is his special care, a house to embellish, extensive estates to improve, the arts and sciences to cultivate—these are what remain to Mr. Jefferson, after having played a distinguished role on the stage of the New World, and what he has preferred to the honorable commission of Minister Plenipotentiary in Europe.10
As these words suggest, Chastellux was visiting Monticello at a felicitous time in Jefferson’s life. Having served as a major figure in American independence, Jefferson now concluded that he had both met his responsibilities to his nation and fulfilled his personal ambitions. As he explained to Monroe the following month: “Before I ventured to declare to my countrymen my determination to retire from public employment I examined well my heart whether it were thoroughly cured of every principle of political ambition, whether no lurking particle remained which might leave me uneasy when reduced within the limits of mere private life. I became satisfied that every fibre of that passion was thoroughly eradicated.”11
Upon concluding that he had exhausted his political ambitions, Jefferson decided to spend the remainder of his life within the realm of home, family, and intellect. When it came to the matter of education, his responsibilities to his family and his devotion to the life of the mind coincided. Not only was he educating his daughters at Monticello, he was also taking responsibility for the education of his sister’s sons and daughters, the Carr children. By this time, the Carrs had moved to Monticello on a more-or-less permanent basis. As far as Jefferson was concerned, the scheme of his life was determined, and he now placed “all prospects of future happiness on domestic and literary objects.”12
Before they parted company, Jefferson recommended that his new friend take in the Natural Bridge during his tour through Virginia. Chastellux wrote, “Mr. Jefferson would most willingly have taken me there, although this wonder with which he is perfectly acquainted is more than eighty miles from his home; but his wife was expecting her confinement at any moment, and he is as good a husband as he is a philosopher and citizen. He therefore only acted as my guide for about sixteen miles, as far as the crossing of the little Mechum River. Here we parted, and I presume to believe that it was with mutual regret.”13 As Chastellux crossed the river and continued toward the Natural Bridge, Jefferson returned to Monticello to be with Martha as she prepared for the birth of their next child.
By the end of April, Chastellux had completed his tour of Virginia and found himself back in Williamsburg, which, before long, he would leave for Philadelphia on his way back to France. Through the first week of May, Jefferson remained at Monticello during Martha’s lying in. So far, they had experienced much bad luck in the matter of children. Though their oldest daughter Patsy was a bright, hearty, athletic nine-year-old, they had lost both their second daughter and their only son in their infancy. Lucy Elizabeth, their fourth daughter, passed away before she turned six months. Mary, their third daughter, was doing well so far. She had celebrated her third birthday the preceding summer.
That spring, Mrs. Jefferson was experiencing a difficult pregnancy, and there was no telling what would happen to either her or the baby she was carrying. Amidst such uncertainty, the aurora borealis appeared around nine o’clock one evening in early May. Jefferson duly recorded the unusual sight in his Garden Book. Though beautiful, the appearance of the northern lights did not bode well. Traditionally, they were considered bad omens: signs of illness or death. Two days after the northern lights appeared, again according to Jefferson’s Garden Book, the buttercups began to bloom. That same day, Martha gave birth to a daughter, whom they named Lucy Elizabeth after the child they had lost the year before. They hoped this Lucy would fair better than her namesake.
The infant seemed to be doing fine in the weeks following the birth. The same cannot be said about her mother. The last months of the pregnancy had been difficult, but the following months were worse. Announcing Lucy’s birth to Monroe, Jefferson expressed profound uncertainty about his wife’s health: “Mrs. Jefferson has added another daughter to our family. She has ever since and still continues very dangerously ill.”14
To nine-year-old Patsy, the birth of her youngest sister and the ensuing events became a life-shaping experience. Decades later, she recalled what happened that spring and summer with a clarity transcending the passage of time. She especially remembered the tender care her father devoted to her mother. “As a nurse,” she wrote, “no female ever had more tenderness or anxiety … For four months that she lingered, he was never out of calling; when not at her bedside, he was writing in a small room which opened immediately at the head of her bed.”15 There’s no telling what Jefferson wrote in that small room that summer. Virtually no correspondence survives from the period. Most likely, he was continuing to expand Notes on the State of Virginia. Regardless what he was working on, the act of writing offered a form of therapy, a way to cope with the threat of his wife’s demise. If he wrote anything of a personal nature during Martha’s illness, he destroyed it with the rest of the letters they exchanged during their courtship and marriage.
One, and only one, written exchange survives between Thomas and Martha Jefferson, which apparently dates from that summer. This written exchange survives on a scrap of paper folded around a lock of Martha’s hair that her husband saved as a memento.16 On this paper she had written: “Time wastes too fast: every letter I trace tells me with what rapidity life follows my pen. The days and hours of it are flying over our heads like clouds of windy day never to return—more every thing presses on.” Recognizing her words as a quotation from one of their favorite works, her husband had completed it: “and every time I kiss thy hand to bid adieu, every absence which follows it, are preludes to that eternal separation which we are shortly to make!”
These words come from a crucial passage late in Tristram Shandy. Jefferson had commonplaced the same passage several years earlier. Articulating his thoughts, Tristram recognizes for the first time the destiny that awaits all mankind. The literary effectiveness of the passage requires a sympathetic response on the reader’s part.17 The written exchange between Thomas and Martha Jefferson shows that in their case Sterne’s writing had its intended effect. His words emotionally engaged the couple, and they recognized, sadly, how pertinent Tristram’s comments were to their own lives.
Having stayed by Martha’s bedside throughout the summer months, Jefferson remained there at dawn Friday morning, September 6. As the sun rose, she declined, and her demise became imminent. Her husband could no longer endure the inevitable. Patsy remembered, “A moment before the closing scene, he was led from the room almost in a state of insensibility by his sister Mrs. Carr, who, with great difficulty, got him into his library, where he fainted, and remained so long insensible that they feared he never would revive.”18 At a quarter to noon Martha Jefferson passed away.
During her husband’s fainting fit, the family had a pallet moved into the library, where Jefferson remained for weeks. Much as he had nursed his wife, young Patsy took it on herself to nurse him. During this period, she passed her tenth birthday. Having experienced the
death of her mother and now faced with the task of nursing her emotionally distraught father, Patsy Jefferson did a lot of growing up that year. Throughout her life, she vividly remembered how her father nervously paced the library floor in the weeks following her mother’s death: “He walked almost incessantly night and day, only lying down occasionally, when nature was completely exhausted.”19
Though Jefferson ended up there by chance and remained there from a kind of emotional lethargy, the library became the place where his grief slowly started to heal. In the past he had sought solace from his books during times of grief. Now, he appears to have acted similarly. A passage from the Iliad seemed especially appropriate to convey how he felt toward his wife’s death. In book 22, Achilles delivers an emotional apostrophe to the slain Patroclus that shows how he will remember his absent friend. Erecting Martha’s tombstone the following year, Jefferson appropriated two lines from Achilles’ speech. The original Greek text engraved on the stone can be translated: “Nay, if even in the house of Hades men forget their dead, yet will I even there remember my dear comrade.”20
With Jefferson ensconced within its walls after his wife’s death, the library became a kind of self-imposed sepulchre. What comfort this seclusion could give him was limited, however. After about three weeks, the library walls seemed as if they were closing in on him, and he sought solace in the open air. Shifting the site of his grief from indoors to out, he still kept Patsy by his side. She recalled, “When at last he left his room, he rode out, and from that time he was incessantly on horseback, rambling about the mountain, in the least frequented roads, and just as often through the woods. In those melancholy rambles I was his constant companion, a solitary witness to many a violent burst of grief, the remembrance of which has consecrated particular scenes of that lost home beyond the power of time to obliterate.”21
Written long afterward, Patsy’s recollection may seem clouded by the passage of time and shaped by a deliberately cultivated melancholy, but contemporary documents confirm both her activities and her father’s emotions. For almost a month after his wife’s death, Jefferson apparently wrote nothing. Eventually taking pen in hand, he conveyed his feelings in a letter to his sister-in-law, Elizabeth Wayles Eppes. Informing her that Patsy was riding five or six miles a day with him, he articulated his emotional state: “This miserable kind of existence is really too burthensome to be borne, and were it not for the infidelity of deserting the sacred charge left me, I could not wish its continuance a moment. For what could it be wished? All my plans of comfort and happiness reversed by a single event and nothing answering in prospect before me but a gloom unbrightened with one chearful expectation.”22
A letter from Chastellux he received in mid-October brightened Jefferson’s spirits considerably. Responding to his friend, Jefferson revealed the therapeutic effect his letter had had: “It found me a little emerging from that stupor of mind which had rendered me as dead to the world as she was whose loss occasioned it. Your letter recalled to my memory, that there were persons still living of much value to me.”23
This response to Chastellux is dated November 26, from Ampthill, the family plantation of Archibald Cary, where Jefferson had brought his children to have them inoculated against the smallpox. This effort provides the greatest indication that Jefferson was recovering from his grief. He had been unable to prevent his wife’s death, but he could take action to protect his children against at least one fatal disease.
While at Ampthill, he received word from James Madison that Congress had once again appointed him minister plenipotentiary to the Court of France. Though he had turned down the appointment earlier, he now accepted it. Summarizing the reasons for his acceptance many years later, Jefferson explained, “I had two months before that lost the cherished companion of my life, in whose affections, unabated on both sides I had lived the last ten years in unchequered happiness. With the public interests, the state of my mind concurred in recommending the change of scene proposed; and I accepted the appointment.”24
He realized that if he acted quickly, he could sail for France with Chastellux, an opportunity that would allow them sufficient leisure time to indulge in stimulating conversation for weeks—what better way to fill a long and tiresome ocean voyage than in the company of an intellectual kindred spirit. Jefferson wrote Chastellux, expressing his hope to reach Philadelphia before he sailed. The crossing would give Jefferson “full Leisure to learn the result of your observations on the Natural bridge, to communicate to you my answers to the queries of Monsr. de Marbois, to receive edification from you on these and on other subjects of science, considering chess too as a matter of science.”25
Jefferson left Monticello the week before Christmas and arrived in Philadelphia two days after the holiday. The current minister of France offered him passage in the Romulus. That was the good news. The bad news was that the Romulus was blocked in by ice a few miles below Baltimore. Jefferson remained in Philadelphia for about a month, but the time was not entirely wasted. He devoted much effort poring over government documents and studying the state of American foreign relations. Throwing himself into the cause of his nation, he had found a way to put his grief behind him. As he had hoped, Chastellux was still in Philadelphia. His companionship provided much comfort.
Before the end of January, Jefferson left Philadelphia for Baltimore and spent nearly a month there doing little beyond waiting for the ice to melt. Before that happened, he learned that a provisional peace treaty between the United States and Great Britain had been signed. He returned to Philadelphia so Congress could excuse him from his appointment. He did not reach home until mid-May.
Since he first began building Monticello, Jefferson always missed his home when he was away. That year he traveled the road to Monticello with mixed feelings. In November, he had decided that the mission to France would take him away, far away, from home for an extended period of time and thus help him forget the great sadness of his wife’s death. Now, with the collapse of his mission, he was returning to Monticello much sooner than he had expected. He was unsure how he would handle his feelings of loss.
The evidence suggests that Jefferson squarely confronted the emotional challenge facing him. The library was where he spent the first sorrowful weeks after Martha’s death. To the library he returned, this time not to lose himself in grief but to find order. Rebuilt since the Shadwell fire, his library now contained more than 2,500 volumes. A large part of that summer he spent organizing and cataloging the collection.
Classifying his books according to the hierarchy of knowledge set forth by Francis Bacon in the Advancement of Learning, Jefferson devised three general categories—history, philosophy, the fine arts—corresponding to Bacon’s faculties of the mind: memory, reason, and imagination. Within these three broad categories, he established separate groupings, which he called chapters in his library catalogue. Each chapter has its own organizational scheme. Despite the care with which he organized his books, Jefferson never fully recorded the principles he used to determine individual chapter organization. What his correspondence makes clear, however, is that he devoted enough time and thought to arranging the contents of the individual chapters to become irritated when others ignored his organization.
Jefferson later referred to the organization of the separate chapters as either “chronological or analytical arrangements.”26 This comment is the only known indication Jefferson provided regarding the individual chapter organization. Basically, he had either organized the books chronologically or used some other logical pattern to arrange them—some easier to discern than others.
He subdivided modern history into three chapters, one for foreign, another for British, and a third for American. The books in each of these chapters are organized differently. For the most part, “Modern History / Foreign” is organized geographically, but Jefferson allowed for other subject categories, as well. The first part of the chapter lists chronologies and historical dictionaries. Universal histories and his
tories of Europe follow. Next come histories of specific nations from different parts of the world, southern Europe first and then northern Europe. Finally, he listed histories of the Near East, Asia, and Africa. Jefferson’s analytical arrangement is specific to general, geographic (south to north), and binary (Europe/not Europe).
“Modern History / British,” on the other hand, he organized chronologically, according to the closing date of the period of history covered by each work. Those parts of Great Britain separate from England—Scotland, Ireland—each received their own subsections at the end of the chapter. “Modern History / American” is organized chronologically and geographically. Pre-Revolutionary works come first, followed by works chronicling the war, and ending with works detailing postwar history. In the initial group, Jefferson listed general histories first and then histories specific to individual regions and colonies. Whereas European histories were organized from south to north, American histories were organized from north to south, starting with New England and proceeding through New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Virginia, South Carolina, and the Barbados.
Discerning the organizational schemes of each chapter in Jefferson’s library catalogue is akin to identifying his patterns of thought. For example, in chapter 17, “Religion,” Jefferson made a subcategory of jurisprudence, revealing his understanding that religious beliefs, like law, offer ways to enforce morality and regulate behavior. The organization within the chapter indicates even more about Jefferson’s attitude toward religion. It begins with works explaining religious beliefs from ancient Greek and Roman times. George Sale’s English translation of the Qur’an comes next, followed by multiple copies of the Old Testament, editions of the Bible incorporating both Old and New Testaments, and then several copies of the New Testament in a number of different scholarly editions.
The Road to Monticello Page 34