Back at Monticello in September 1808, Jefferson was home to attend Anne’s wedding on the nineteenth. Still in her teens, she married a young man named Charles Lewis Bankhead. Anne was the gardener in the family, and she had been instrumental in helping her grandfather plant his gardens and in overseeing them while he was in Washington. In her first known letter to her grandfather after her marriage, Anne still sounds like a schoolgirl. She assures him that she was spending her mornings reading French, studying history, and “doing sums.”28
Alas, the schoolgirl had to grow up all too quickly. Abandoning his plans to read law under Jefferson, Charles Bankhead turned profligate and became a drunken, abusive husband. Edmund Bacon related a story of Anne having to hide in the potato bin to escape her husband’s drink-induced violence. Her mother hoped for someone to live with the couple in order to protect Anne from her husband.
The same month that Anne was married, her brother Jeff turned sixteen. His grandfather was doing all he could to advance his education. That month Jefferson presented him with several scholarly editions of classic authors—Homer, Virgil, Ovid, Boethius. Later that fall, Jeff moved to Philadelphia to live and study natural history with Charles Willson Peale. While in Philadelphia, he would also study anatomy, surgery, and botany. As a present for the family, Peale painted a portrait of Thomas Jefferson Randolph, which his grandfather greatly enjoyed.29
Jeff took a break in his studies to be with his grandfather in Washington at the end of his administration. Jefferson continued to entertain nightly throughout his presidency. His grandson provides a good indication of Jefferson’s dinnertime conversation: “cheerful, often sportive, and illustrated by anecdotes.”30 Frances Few, a young woman who had the good fortune to dine at President Jefferson’s table late in his second term, recorded the episode in her diary. Her account shows that Jefferson’s time in office, though trying, had not dulled his sense of humor or mellowed his disgust with formality. Rather, his time as president had given him many new experiences that he turned into anecdotes. An anecdote about the Danish minister he related to Miss Few has another anecdote embedded within it.
Thomas Jefferson Randolph, by Charles Willson Peale. (Monticello, Thomas Jefferson Foundation, Inc.)
One evening, President Jefferson invited the Danish minister to dinner. His guest was happy for the opportunity to visit because he had been wanting to tell Jefferson that the Danish government disapproved of the way the president was being treated. As chief magistrate, he deserved more respect.
“Great men,” the Danish minister said, “ought to be surrounded by an atmosphere of ceremony.”
Jefferson responded with an anecdote about one of the present kings of Europe who was fond of hunting.
“The day was uncommonly fine and the king was all ready for the chase when one of his courtiers announced a number of strangers,” Jefferson explained. “Before the ceremony of introducing them was over the king’s patience was quite exhausted and turning to a courtier he said in a foreign language ‘Oh how I hate ceremony.’ The courtier bowed and said, ‘Sire you do not remember that you are yourself ceremony.’ ”31
On Saturday, March 4, 1809, James Madison was inaugurated as president. After the inauguration at the Capitol, a large group of people gathered at the Madisons’ home. Mr. and Mrs. Samuel Harrison Smith were among the guests, and, not surprisingly, Mrs. Smith’s letters and reminiscences form the fullest account of the event. When the Smiths arrived, the house was “completely filled, parlours, entry, drawing room and bed room. Near the door of the drawing room,” Mrs. Smith observed, “Mr. and Mrs. Madison stood to receive their company. She looked extremely beautiful, was drest in a plain cambrick dress with a very long train, plain round the neck without any handerkerchief, and beautiful bonnet of purple velvet, and white satin with white plumes. She was all dignity, grace and affability.”32
Though Mrs. Smith enjoyed greeting the fourth president of the United States, she really wanted to see the third. After shaking hands with President Madison, she spied Jefferson across the room. Their eyes met, and she quickly approached him. He warmly greeted Mrs. Smith, took her hand, and held it as they talked.
“Remember the promise you have made me, to come to see us next summer, do not forget it,” Jefferson said.
She assured him that she and her husband would visit soon. Reflecting on his presidency, she told him, “You have now resigned a heavy burden.”
“Yes indeed,” Jefferson replied, “and am much happier at this moment than my friend.”
That evening the Madisons hosted the very first inaugural ball. As the ex-president entered, the Marine Band played Jefferson’s March. Mrs. Smith observed, “He spoke to all whom he knew, and was quite the plain, unassuming citizen.”33 Mrs. Smith was not the only one who recorded conversations with Jefferson this evening. John Quincy Adams noted what he and Jefferson talked about, too.
Remembering the impression Adams had made upon him in Paris, Jefferson asked if he was as fond of poetry as he had been in his youth.
“Yes,” Adams responded, explaining that he had not lost his relish for good poetry, though his “taste for the minor poets, and particular for amatory verses, was not so keen as it had been.”
Jefferson replied that he was “still fond of reading Homer, but did not take much delight in Virgil.”34
Mrs. Smith summarized Jefferson’s general conduct at this inaugural ball: “Mr. Jefferson did not stay above two hours; he seemed in high spirits and his countenance beamed with a benevolent joy. I do believe father never loved son more than he loves Mr. Madison, and I believe too that every demonstration of respect to Mr. M. gave Mr. J. more pleasure than if paid to himself.”35
Jefferson’s behavior after leaving office, at least in terms of his literary patronage, differed little from his behavior as president. He continued to encourage others to write. He loaned books to many who were writing books of their own. He wrote voluminous letters to would-be biographers and historians describing men he had known and important historical events in which he had played a part. And he continued subscribing to the works of many American authors. When Philip Freneau wrote seeking subscribers for a new edition of his Poems, for example, Jefferson was happy to oblige.
Freneau also asked Jefferson to circulate the subscription list among his Virginia neighbors. This Jefferson hesitated to do, partly because of his reluctance to leave Monticello and partly because of his awareness that his country neighbors generally disliked subscribing for books sight unseen. He explained to Freneau: “The inhabitants of the country are mostly industrious farmers employed in active life and reading little. They rarely buy a book of whose merit they can not judge by having it in their hand, and are less disposed to engage for those yet unknown to them. I am becoming like them myself in a preference of the healthy and chearful emploiments without doors, to the being immured within four brick walls. But under the shade of a tree one of your volumes will be a pleasant pocket companion.”36
While Jefferson continued to patronize American men and women of letters after leaving the presidency, there was one man he was powerless to help, the forlorn Jonathan Brunt. Since visiting Monticello in September 1807, Brunt continued to roam the nation looking for printers who would give him employment or, at least, let him use their printing plants long enough to print pamphlets to keep him going until the next town with a print shop. In 1809, Brunt trekked across Tennessee in search of work. While in Knoxville, he printed an autobiographical pamphlet titled The Little Medley. He traveled as far west as Nashville and considered going from there to New Orleans.
From Nashville, Brunt wrote Jefferson again. This time he asked a special favor: “The principal intention of this letter is to request your Excellency to let me come to Monticello, to have a private room there, for I must die ere long, except Deity work another miracle for me,—The sooner I get out of this knavish world the better.—I hope sir, your religious principles are the same you had in your youth.—Tho’ I h
ave wrote to a printer at New Orleans, about the printing business there, yet I do not want to go there:—The warmness of the climate is not the only reason.”37
Without waiting for a response from Jefferson, Brunt abandoned his plans to go to New Orleans and trudged back across Tennessee and Virginia. He reached Monticello three days before Christmas. Finally, Jefferson had the life he had been longing for throughout his presidency. The laughter of his grandchildren filled the halls of Monticello. He had no room for a crazy printer who wanted to come here to die. On this December day, he gave Brunt two dollars in charity and sent him on his way. Brunt continued wandering the country. He showed up at Monticello at least twice more, once in November 1811 and again in January 1815. Jefferson gave him a dollar or two in charity on both occasions. Though Jefferson had no place for Brunt in either his administration or his home, he always had a soft spot in his heart for this weird little man in a blue jacket and an old white woolen hat.
PART V
MONTICELLO
CHAPTER 35
Return to Monticello
During his presidency, Thomas Jefferson had accumulated a considerable number of personal possessions, including, of course, lots and lots of books. Anticipating his retirement by more than a year, he had sent much of his presidential library back to Monticello, enough books to fill eight trunks. Together with four other packages, these book-filled trunks weighed two and a half tons.1 As his retirement approached in February 1809, enough other stuff remained—books too essential to pack, papers, furniture, lamps—that he summoned overseer Edmund Bacon to come up from Monticello to help. Together they filled about thirty packages to be sent home by water. The rest they loaded onto wagons driven to Washington. Bacon recalled, “I had three wagons from Monticello—two six-mule teams loaded with boxes, and the other four sorrel Chickasaw horses, and the wagon pretty much loaded with shrubbery from Maine’s nursery. The servants rode on these wagons. I had the carriage horses and carriage, and rode behind them.”2 Bacon left Washington on March ninth or tenth. Jefferson followed on Saturday, the eleventh.
For contemplative souls, moving is a time for reflection. As Jefferson prepared to leave Washington for good, he apparently thought less about what he had accomplished as president and more about what he intended to accomplish once he returned to Monticello. The books and papers that partly filled those trunks gave him much to do once he returned home. He wanted to catch up on his reading, which his presidential responsibilities had prevented him from doing. And he had many different writing projects planned. Some works he would write himself, others he would encourage friends to write. Jefferson contributed to literary history not only as an author but also as a facilitator, someone who recognizes literary talent in others and encourages them to pursue the writing projects that suit them best. Jefferson’s literary patronage continued throughout his retirement.
According to Bacon, shrubbery from Thomas Main’s nursery formed a significant part of Jefferson’s baggage, but there was one plant Jefferson was leaving behind, a potted geranium. Correctly assuming that he would not be taking this potted plant home, Margaret Bayard Smith asked if she could have it: “I have seen in your cabinet a Geranium, which I understood you cultivated with your own hands. If you do not take it home with you, I entreat you to leave it with me. I cannot tell you how inexpressively precious it will be to my heart. It shall be attended with the assiduity of affection and watered with tears of regret each day as I attend it, will I invoke the best blessings of Heaven, on the most venerated of human beings!” With a request like that, Jefferson was happy to put the geranium into her nurturing hands.3
He left the President’s House in his phaeton with two servants accompanying him on horseback. At Georgetown he took the ferry across the Potomac for the last time. The weather was tolerable this Saturday, and they made it as far as Barnett’s Tavern by nightfall. The weather grew worse on Sunday. The roads got so bad Jefferson found that traveling by horseback was more efficient than in the phaeton, though riding a horse through an incessant snowstorm was quite fatiguing, too. On one day of this trip he traveled eight hours through “as disagreeable snow storm as I was ever in.”4
Ahead of him, Bacon was having an even more difficult time. On Monday, March 13, the snow came down fast and hard. By the time he reached Shackelford’s Tavern at Culpeper Courthouse, it was already “half-leg deep.” The deep snow did not put off the locals. Looking forward to Jefferson’s arrival, many had braved the weather and gathered at Shackelford’s. Bacon remembered:
A large crowd of people had collected there, expecting that the President would be along. When I rode up, they thought I was the President and shouted and hurrahed tremendously. When I got out of the carriage, they laughed very heartily at their mistake. There was a platform along the whole front of the tavern, and it was full of people. Some of them had been waiting a good while and drinking a good deal, and they made so much noise that they scared the horses, and Diomede backed, and tread upon my foot, and lamed me so that I could hardly get into the carriage the next morning.5
The noisiest of the bunch, a tall, boisterous geyser, expressed his determination to see “Old Tom.” Others anxiously asked when he would arrive. Bacon guessed that Jefferson was making good time in the phaeton, comparatively speaking, and predicted that he would reach Shackelford’s that evening. He went inside and told the proprietor to build a large fire in a private room for the former president.
Actually, Jefferson was making better time than his overseer realized. While Bacon was indoors speaking with tavernkeeper, Benjamin Shackelford, the crowd outside saw Jefferson in the distance making his way through the snow. They shouted for joy. Hearing their shouts, Bacon went back outside to see the phaeton slowly approaching.
“When he came up,” Bacon remembered, “there was a great cheering again. I motioned to him to follow me; took him straight to his room and locked the door. The tall old fellow came and knocked very often, but I would not let him in. I told Mr. Jefferson not to mind him, he was drunk. Finally the door was opened, and they rushed in and filled the room. It was as full as I ever saw a barroom. He stood up and made a short address to them.”6
Tuesday night, the fourteenth, Jefferson reached Gordon’s Tavern. He had enjoyed Nathaniel Gordon’s hospitality many times during his back-and-forth trips between Monticello and Washington and recommended the place to others. He was now only twenty miles from home. Barring another hellacious snowstorm, he would be home the next day. Finally, he would be among his family, his friends, and his books: “moored in the midst of my affections, and free to follow the pursuits of my choice.”7
These last words come from a letter he wrote Martha two weeks before he left Washington. Each time he had returned to Monticello from Washington, she and her husband would bring their children to come stay at Monticello. Now that he was retired, he wanted Martha, his only surviving child, to move to Monticello permanently. But he was concerned that managing such a large household would overburden her. In his letter, he suggested that Anna Marks, his sister and her aunt, should also move to Monticello in order to manage the household.
Martha was shocked and dismayed at his suggestion. Devoted to her father, she, too, was looking forward to his retirement when they could be together. Her response contains what may be the strongest words she ever wrote him: “As to Aunt Marks it would not be desirable to have her if it was proper. I had full proof of her being totally incompetent to the business the last summer. The servants have no sort of respect for her and take just what they please before her face. She is an excellent creature and a neat manager in a little way, but she has neither head nor a sufficient weight of character to manage so large an establishment as yours will be. I shall devote my self to it and with feelings which I never could have in my own affairs.”8 Martha’s devotion to her father and her willingness to leave Edgehill, her nearby estate, to live at Monticello strained her relationship with her husband, who devoted more time to his own politi
cal career.
The unseasonably cold weather that year was slowing the onset of spring. Upon his arrival at Monticello, Jefferson observed, “No oats sown, not much tobacco seed, and little done in the gardens. Wheat has suffered considerably. No vegetation visible yet but the red maple, weeping willow and Lilac.”9 He had much work to do to get the place in shape but looked forward to spending his days on horseback overseeing the farm. The freedom to do whatever he wanted to do whenever he wanted to do it was a delicious pleasure. As he informed Charles Willson Peale the first week of May, “I am totally occupied without doors, and enjoying a species of happiness I never before knew, that of doing whatever hits the humor of the moment without responsibility or injury to any one.”10
Jefferson’s adverb “totally” is typical of his personal correspondence, which is filled with absolute statements. Despite what he said to Peale, he was not spending all his time outdoors. He had plenty of indoor occupations to keep him busy. He devoted several hours each day to reading and writing. But one of the most extensive writing projects he had planned for his retirement came to naught: his plans to assemble a polyglot Indian vocabulary was ruined while his books and papers were being transported. Of the thirty packages he sent by water from Washington to Monticello, only twenty-nine made it. He related the sad story to Benjamin Smith Barton:
I have now been thirty years availing myself of every possible opportunity of procuring Indian vocabularies to the same set of words: my opportunities were probably better than will ever occur again to any person having the same desire. I had collected about 50. and had digested most of them in collateral columns, and meant to have printed them the last year of my stay in Washington. But not having yet digested Capt Lewis’s collection, nor having leisure then to do it, I put it off till should return home. The whole, as well digest as originals were packed in a trunk of stationary and sent round by water with about 30. other packages of my effects from Washington, and while ascending James river, this package, on account of its weight and presumed precious contents, was singled out and stolen. The thief being disappointed on opening it, threw into the river all its contents of which he thought he could make no use. Among these were the whole of the vocabularies. Some leaves floated ashore [and] were found in the mud; but these were very few, and so defaced by the mud and water that no general use can ever be made of them.11
The Road to Monticello Page 67