The Road to Monticello

by Hayes, Kevin J. ;

  Comparing Heyne’s edition with Villoison’s was a fairly easy matter for Jefferson, who could use the ingenious revolving bookstand he had invented. Shaped like a cube when not in use, the stand could be unfolded to hold five books simultaneously. Hinged at the top, the four vertical sides could be lifted up and angled out. A lip at the bottom of each let a book rest on the angled surface. Furthermore, the top of the cube could be tilted up to hold a fifth book directly above one of the lower books. Even when fully loaded with books, the stand could be easily revolved to let Jefferson quickly peruse multiple texts in succession.

  With Heyne’s Iliad on top and Villoison’s Iliad below it, Jefferson could open both books to their corresponding passages and look at them simultaneously, quickly dropping his eyes from the top volume to the bottom one, with no more difficulty than reading footnotes. Jefferson had long enjoyed parallel text editions; his invention let him parallel different translations directly. For further reference, he could place related books—different editions, other translations, pertinent historical works—on the three remaining sides.

  When Jefferson first began assembling his retirement library, he saw it predominantly as a collection to amuse himself in his old age. After arranging the sale of his great library to Congress, he informed one correspondent, “I have now to make up again a collection for myself of such as may amuse my hours of reading.”6 Reiterating the idea that his retirement library would be for amusement, not for use, he told Adams that fewer books would suffice. Though Jefferson may have intended to keep his new library small, once his bibliomanie took hold, he began buying books at a furious rate. In the decade following the sale of his great library, he amassed a new collection of impressive proportions. His retirement library would grow to more than fifteen hundred volumes in nearly a thousand titles. Though one-quarter the size of his great library, the retirement collection is remarkable in terms of both size and quality, given the comparatively brief period of time he spent assembling it.

  With a few modifications, Jefferson used the same organizational scheme for his retirement library he had used for the great library. Furthermore, he bought some of the same titles that had been part of his former library. But he also added many new and different kinds of books that had not been in his great library. Though it is convenient to refer to this collection as Jefferson’s retirement library, many of the books within it reflect new attitudes toward literature that were emerging in the early nineteenth century. Indeed, Jefferson’s retirement library has much in common with the libraries of a new generation of writers who were making their mark in the early nineteenth century. This old neoclassicist was reading books like a Romantic.

  Thomas Jefferson’s Revolving Bookstand. (Monticello, Thomas Jefferson Foundation, Inc.)

  Retaining his memory-reason-imagination scheme, Jefferson organized his collection by placing history first. He began with civil history, followed by natural history. Civil history he subdivided into ancient and modern. Some of the works of ancient history are throwbacks to his youth, such as his copy of the Foulis edition of Cornelius Nepos. He first read Nepos as a boy, and the work had remained a favorite throughout his life. Acquiring a replacement copy, he could reread the book whenever he wished. With this new acquisition, he may have had a different purpose in mind—to share with his grandchildren. To Thomas Rogers, the compiler of A New American Biographical Dictionary—another work in the retirement library—Jefferson commented that no books interest children more than “such works as Cornelius Nepos.”7

  Thomas Jefferson’s Organizational Scheme for His Retirement Library, from Thomas Jefferson Papers, Series 7, Miscellaneous Bound Volumes. (Library of Congress, Manuscripts Division)

  Other books shelved among ancient history reflect a modern attitude toward the classics. Jefferson acquired a copy of John Lemprière’s Classical Dictionary, the great repository of classical lore that fired the imagination of John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and other Romantic poets. While organizing and condensing centuries-old materials known to most every schoolboy, Lemprière let his readers look at the classics afresh. His work remains the finest classical dictionary ever compiled.

  The collection of modern history in Jefferson’s retirement library combines old standards with new favorites. He owned such works of European history as Jacques Stoer’s early-seventeenth-century Geneva edition of Francesco Guicciardini’s Historia d’Italia and a six-volume edition of Davila’s Historia delle Guerre Civile di Francia. He also owned the latest works about Egypt, including Pièces Diverses et Correspondance Relatives aux Opérations de l’Armée d’Orient en Égypte, a detailed treatment of Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign, and Sir Robert Wilson’s History of the British Expedition to Egypt—famous for charging Napoleon with cruelty against his prisoners at Jaffa and his own soldiers at Cairo.8

  Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign captured the Romantic imagination. Both Samuel Coleridge and Robert Southey closely followed his journey to Egypt and became fascinated with all things Egyptian. Jefferson got caught up in the contemporary fascination with Egyptian art and culture, too. He obtained a model of the pyramid of Cheops and what was supposed to be a statue of Cleopatra reclining with a serpent twisted around her. After careful study, Jefferson concluded that the statue did not depict Cleopatra at all, but Ariadne. This perceptive conclusion also reveals his knowledge of recent European art scholarship.9

  Southey was represented in Jefferson’s retirement library by his Life of Nelson, one of the great biographies in the history of English literature. Jefferson’s resentment toward the British navy did not stop him from appreciating the personal qualities Southey attributed to Admiral Nelson. As part of his biography, Southey presented a series of anecdotes from Nelson’s boyhood showing his innate courage, honor, and determination, exemplary traits that foreshadow his subsequent accomplishments. Jefferson used the same method in his “Life of Captain Lewis.” Overall, Southey depicted Nelson as a man who embodied many fine personal characteristics: altruism, bravery, patience, patriotism, and selflessness.

  As the presence of Cornelius Nepos under ancient history and Southey’s Life of Nelson under British history indicate, Jefferson did not make a separate subdivision for biography in his classification scheme. Rather, he subsumed biography within history. Similarly, he shelved American biography with American history—though that’s not what he told Daniel Webster. When his copy of William Wirt’s Sketches of the Life and Character of Patrick Henry reached Monticello, Jefferson joked that he “had been greatly perplexed in deciding where to place the volume, but had finally arranged it under the head of Fiction.”10 Jefferson was pulling Webster’s leg. The catalogue of his retirement library reveals that he shelved Wirt’s Life of Henry with other works treating the American Revolution. Jefferson made the same joke with Henry Lee’s Memoirs of the War in the Southern Department of the United States, which he called a “historical novel.”11 He also shelved Lee’s Memoirs with other books of American history. In fact, he kept it right next to Wirt’s Life of Henry.

  Since the war, many American patriots had biographies written about them, and Jefferson added several of these to his collection. He subscribed for six copies of William Barton’s Memoirs of the Life of David Rittenhouse without realizing how big the book would be. Presenting one copy of this beefy six-hundred-page octavo to John Adams, Jefferson wryly commented, “Even its episodes and digressions may add to the amusement it will furnish you. But if the history of the world were written on the same scale, the whole world would not hold it.”12

  Jefferson’s new books gave him the opportunity to rethink his attitudes toward biography and historiography. The conversations about books and authors that occurred in his library with family, friends, and visitors helped hone his ideas. When the British traveler Francis Hall came to Monticello, for example, he and Jefferson discussed many different topics. Their conversation eventually settled on history writing. Jefferson told Hall an anecdote about Benjamin Franklin that
he had heard from the Abbé Raynal:

  The Abbé was in company with Dr. Franklin, and several Americans at Paris, when mention chanced to be made of his anecdote of Polly Baker, related in his sixth volume, upon which one of the company observed, that no such law as that alluded to in the story, existed in New England: the Abbé stoutly maintained the authenticity of his tale, when Dr. Franklin, who had hitherto remained silent, said, “I can account for all this; you took the anecdote from a newspaper, of which I was at that time editor, and, happening to be very short of news, I composed and inserted the whole story.” “Ah! Doctor,” said the Abbé making a true French retreat, “I had rather have your stories, than other men’s truths.”13

  Jefferson related this anecdote to show “how history, even when it calls itself philosophical, is written.” Good writing sometimes overrides good reporting. A highly crafted hoax is more seductive than plain truth.

  With Hall, Jefferson also discussed a specific book in his collection of American history, Carlo Botta’s Storia della Guerra dell’Indepenza degli Stati Uniti d’America. Originally, Botta had presented Jefferson a copy of the work. Since this presentation copy had gone to the Library of Congress with the rest of his great library, Jefferson obtained a replacement copy. Hall wrote, “Mr. Jefferson preferred Botta’s Italian History of the American Revolution, to any that had yet appeared, remarking, however, the inaccuracy of the speeches.”14

  Hall’s brief account confirms more extensive remarks about Botta’s history Jefferson made to others. “Botta,” he wrote Adams, “has put his own speculations and reasonings into the mouths of persons whom he names, but who, you and I know, never made such speeches. In this he has followed the example of the antients, who made their great men deliver long speeches, all of them in the same style, and in that of the author himself.” Jefferson later reemphasized his appreciation of Botta’s history of the American Revolution, despite the interpolated speeches: “He has given that history with more detail, precision and candor, than any writer I have yet met with. It is to be sure compiled from those writers; but it is a good secretion of their matter, the pure from the impure, and presented in a just sense of right in opposition to usurpation.”15

  Organizing his books on natural history, Jefferson devised four different levels of substructure. The first level contained a general section on natural history, which is not subdivided further. Other sections at the same level treat, in order, animals, vegetables, minerals, physics, the earth, and the heavens. Jefferson further subdivided all of these categories.

  The section on animals he split into “Brutes” and “Man.” A copy of Fauna Americana presented by its author, Richard Harlan, Jefferson placed in “Brutes.” The object Harlan set for this work was the “concise and scientific description and classification of the mammiferous animals of N. America.”16 With Jefferson, Harlan shared an interest in vertebrate paleontology and sought to describe both living and extinct species. Though considered the first systematic presentation of the zoology of North America, Fauna Americana is marred by insufficient data and its author’s overreliance on A. G. Demarest’s Mammologie.17 Jefferson nonetheless admired the work as he admired all contributions to the development of American intellectual life.

  The subsection devoted to man is subdivided into three categories: structure, physiology, and occupations. Structure has only one subdivision—anatomy—and only one book within it, Caspar Wistar’s System of Anatomy for the Use of Students of Medicine, the first American textbook of anatomy. Physiology is further subdivided into surgery and medicine. Surgery, too, has only one book within it, Samuel Cooper’s First Lines of the Practice of Surgery, an introductory text.

  Jefferson’s collection of medical books in his retirement library is remarkably tiny, especially compared with other great early American libraries. Fascinated with how the human body worked, William Byrd II recorded the workings of his own body in his secret diary and assembled a personal collection of several hundred medical books. In addition to having one of the finest general collections of medical books in eighteenth-century America, Benjamin Franklin also had a significant collection of books on the two maladies that afflicted him late in life, gout and stones of the urinary tract. Seeking to understand and remedy his afflictions, Franklin kept buying the latest books on these subjects almost to the time of his death.18 The paucity of medical books in Jefferson’s retirement library testifies to the relatively good health he enjoyed in his waning years.

  The migraine headaches that had beset him through his public life had lessened considerably during his retirement years. He was occasionally bothered by rheumatism, but his general therapy for it was simply to endure. Jefferson’s small collection of medical books also suggests his skepticism toward medical theory. Dr. Robley Dunglison, who attended Jefferson in his final illness, observed, “Mr. Jefferson was considered to have but little faith in physic; and has often told me that he would rather trust to the unaided, or rather uninterfered with, efforts of nature than to physicians in general.” Jefferson joked that “whenever he saw three physicians together he looked up to discover whether there was not a turkey buzzard in the neighborhood.”19

  Measured by the books in his retirement library, Jefferson’s medical concerns leaned more toward public health than personal health. He had multiple works about yellow fever, including Benjamin Rush’s Observations on the Origin of the Malignant Bilious, or Yellow Fever in Philadelphia and Nathaniel Potter’s Memoir on Contagion, More Especially as It Respects the Yellow Fever. Jefferson had lost many friends to yellow fever, including Benjamin Franklin Bache, who died of yellow fever in 1798, just as he was establishing himself as one of the nation’s finest newspapermen. Hore Browse Trist—Nicholas’s father—had died of yellow fever in Natchez, Louisiana, where President Jefferson had sent him to fill the post of customs collector.

  Occupations, the third subdivision within the “Man” subsection, is further divided into agriculture and a section Jefferson labeled “Technics,” which included such diverse works as William Roscoe’s On the Origin and Vicissitudes of Literature, Science and Art, and Their Influence on the Present State of Society, a paper delivered at the opening of the Liverpool Royal Institution. Roscoe, a self-proclaimed literary historian, was a guiding force in establishing this institution, which he saw as central to the purpose of joining “the pursuits of literature with the affairs of the world.”20 Despite his ongoing animosity toward Great Britain, Jefferson remained interested in British developments in science and literature. Political boundaries matter little to those who see themselves as citizens of the Republic of Letters.

  “Technics” also included books on inland navigation, such as Robert Fulton’s Treatise on the Improvement of Canal Navigation, which proposed a system of canals and other innovative forms of transportation to connect all the major cities; Albert Gallatin’s Treatise on Internal Navigation; and Elkanah Watson’s History of the Rise, Progress, and Existing Condition of the Western Canals in the State of New York, from September, 1788, to 1819.

  Jefferson’s shelf of agricultural books shows him still hoping to carry out Mazzei’s dream of cultivating olives and wine grapes in Virginia. In addition to Augustus Hillhouse’s Essay on the History and Cultivation of the European Olive-Tree, he owned a presentation copy of John Adlum’s Memoir on the Cultivation of the Vine in America, and the Best Mode of Making Wine. James Madison, who had a copy of Adlum’s work in his library at Montpelier, encouraged local viticulture, too. Presenting the book to Jefferson, Adlum also gave him some wine; Jefferson appreciated both. In his letter of thanks, he told Adlum that he had no knowledge of viticulture from “either practice or reading.”21 Jefferson was being modest. Besides Adlum’s treatise, his retirement library also included two important French works on viticulture.

  Minerals, another subcategory within natural history, seems poorly conceived. There are only a few books listed within the category, all devoted to geology. The subcategory “The Earth,”
which occupies the same level in natural history as minerals, is further subdivided into geography and geology. Apparently, Jefferson created two different categories for geology and never sufficiently distinguished them. The geology books point to another problem with Jefferson’s organizational scheme: where to put books that belonged in more than one category. He shelved Amos Eaton’s Geological and Agricultural Survey of the District Adjoining the Erie Canal with his geology books. Given its purpose, Eaton’s work might belong with canal literature. Sometimes Jefferson’s rigorous organization cut across more natural subject divisions.

  His organization was not so rigid as to prevent him from relocating a book from one section to another, if he deemed it appropriate. In his great library, he shelved his copy of Paul Philippe Gudin’s poem L’Astronomie with other volumes of didactic verse. After selling his library to Congress, he bought a replacement copy of Gudin’s L’Astronomie, which he now shelved within a category titled “The Heavens.” A poem would hardly seem to belong with other serious astronomical works, but upon rereading it, Jefferson realized that Gudin’s set of explanatory notes was the best part of the book, so he recategorized it. Telling a correspondent about Gudin’s L’Astronomie, Jefferson explained, “You will find the notes really of value. They embody and ascertain to us all the scraps of new discoveries which we have learnt in detached articles from less authentic publications.”22 In the new edition of L’Astronomie, Gudin even speculated about the possibility of life on other planets.