The Road to Monticello

by Hayes, Kevin J. ;

  By the time Jefferson left Monticello for his annual spring visit to Poplar Forest on Saturday, April 21, 1821, he had taken his life story up to his visit to London in 1786. He did not resume the autobiography until after he returned to Monticello. In recent years, his visits to Poplar Forest had become increasingly important to him. Located in Bedford County about seventy miles from Monticello, the Poplar Forest property had belonged to Jefferson ever since the death of his father-in-law John Wayles. Throughout that time, it had remained a working farm. It never really became a vacation retreat until Jefferson began building there during his second term as president.

  The house Jefferson built at Poplar Forest was octagonal. Constructed on a slope, it had one story in the front and two in the rear. The center room, twenty feet square, served as the dining room. The drawing room, Jefferson’s chambers, three other bedrooms, and the pantry encircled the center room. There was a portico in front, connected to the center room by a vestibule; a terrace on one side; and a verandah in the rear, opening out from the drawing room. Ellen, who often accompanied her grandfather here, found the center room beautiful, the whole house “very pretty and pleasant.”24 Ellen’s reminiscence of their visits to Poplar Forest provides the fullest account of their time there. Her sisters, Cornelia and Virginia, often came to Poplar Forest, too, and fondly remembered their experiences.

  The seventy-mile trip from Monticello required two overnight stops. Virginia recalled her grandfather’s behavior on the road: “His cheerful conversation, so agreeable and instructive, his singing as we journeyed along, made the time pass pleasantly, even travelling through the solitudes of Buckingham and Campbell counties over indifferent roads.” Other contemporary accounts verify how much he loved to sing as he traveled. Isaac Jefferson remembered, “Mr. Jefferson [was] always singing when ridin’ or walkin’; hardly see him anywhar outdoors but what he was a-singin’. Had a fine clear voice.”25

  Virginia remembered their road food: “Our cold dinner was always put up by his own hands; a pleasant spot by the road-side chosen to eat it, and he was the carver and helped us to our cold fowl and ham, and mixed the wine and water to drink with it.” Her reminiscence jibes with her grandfather’s advice for traveling through the Virginia countryside: “Cold victuals on the road will be better than any thing which any of the country taverns will give you.”26

  “The roads were not bad for country roads,” Ellen recalled. “We always stopped at the same simple country inns, where the country-people were as much pleased to see the ‘Squire,’ as they always called Mr. Jefferson, as they could have been to meet their own best friends. They set out for him the best they had, gave him the nicest room, and seemed to hail his passage as an event most interesting to themselves.” When Jefferson and his granddaughters reached Poplar Forest, the news spread around Bedford County quickly. His neighbors brought him all kinds of fruit, game, poultry, and vegetables. One time a neighbor brought a quarter of a bear cub.27

  These reminiscences tell a rosy picture of the journey from Monticello to Poplar Forest. With the passage of time, the memories of Jefferson’s granddaughters took on a sentimental hue. The letters they wrote at the moment tell a more realistic story. That spring Ellen and Cornelia accompanied their grandfather; Virginia stayed home. Cornelia’s first letter to her from the trip captures the difficulties of travel. The day they left Monticello, they reached Warren’s Tavern at the peak of a ferocious rainstorm. They were intending to go farther, but the roads were so bad that they were stuck at Warren’s all night. The next day they planned to reach Hunter’s Tavern but only got as far as Flood’s—“horrid Old Flood’s”—where Cornelia and her sister slept “between the sheets that Dr. and Mrs. Flood had been sleeping in for a month.” Well, “not between them exactly,” Cornelia continued, “for finding the counterpane clean we pinn’d the top sheet down close all round and laid upon that.”28

  The hours they spent at these taverns could be quite tedious. They usually brought books along to help them pass the time. On one trip, Ellen brought Catherine Hutton’s epistolary novel, The Miser Married, which relates the story of a debt-ridden and deceitful widow who marries a miser named Winterdale.29 Ellen found the first half “insufferably stupid and dull, but,” as she wrote to her mother, “the rest amused me a good deal; the character of Lady Winterdale is so well drawn that it redeems the whole book.” Ellen was happy she brought some books to read on the road: “We found them a great relief to the ennui of the journey; we got in so early in the evening, and loitered so long at the tiresome taverns, where we stopped to have the horses fed, that reading was a most valuable resource during these weary hours.”30

  That spring they reached Poplar Forest “fatigu’d to death… after the most tedious journey that ever was made,” Cornelia said. “I am sure I almost died on the road from impatience.”31

  Since Jefferson had designed Monticello as his personal paradise, a vacation home might seem superfluous. Though life at Monticello often seemed idyllic during his retirement, there was one aspect of it he disliked but was powerless to control: the magnificent home of a well-respected former president proved to be a mecca for gawkers. Poplar Forest offered an escape from the curious and gave him the opportunity to indulge his favorite activities without interruption. As Ellen said, “At Poplar Forest he found in a pleasant home, rest, leisure, power to carry on his favorite pursuits—to think, to study, to read—whilst the presence of part of his family took away all character of solitude from his retreat.”32

  Grandpa Jefferson made sure the children brought much to keep themselves busy throughout their vacation. Ellen typically brought drawing materials and embroidery. Besides the books to read on the road, they also brought other books to read while at Poplar Forest. In one of her letters, Cornelia mentioned bringing a “long row of books.”33 One time Ellen brought the fifth volume of the British Theatre, which formed part of the multivolume collection edited by Elizabeth Inchbald.34 This particular volume contained four works by Shakespeare—Coriolanus, Othello, The Tempest, and Twelfth Night—and Ben Jonson’s Every Man in His Humour.

  Jefferson always had plenty of books on vacation. He kept a separate library at Poplar Forest but usually brought some current books with him. Thomas Law’s Second Thoughts on Instinctive Impulses, for example, he received just before leaving Monticello for Poplar Forest one year. He brought it with him and enjoyed it immensely. The peacefulness of Poplar Forest gave him much time to reflect on Law’s ideas and to compose a response to him that amounted to an essay on man’s moral sense. As the letter’s conclusion explains, “The leisure and solitude of my situation here has led me to the indiscretion of taxing you with a long letter on a subject whereon nothing new can be offered you.”35

  For the most part, the Poplar Forest library was largely a collection of classics. Many of the volumes it contained were small-format books, which Jefferson shelved in handsome mahogany bookcases.36 The thirty-eight-volume collection of Bell’s beautifully illustrated edition of Shakespeare that he had acquired in Europe found its way to Poplar Forest. The 109-volume collection of British poets he had ostensibly purchased for Martha in Paris also became part of Jefferson’s vacation library. His granddaughters read their way through this collection of British poets. In one letter, Cornelia quoted lines from William Shenstone’s Poetical Works, some of the same lines her grandfather had quoted in “Thoughts on English Prosody” three decades earlier.37

  Jefferson’s collection of ancient classics at Poplar Forest was quite full. He had a ninety-eight-volume collection of carefully edited classical works, which he called his petit format library. Other fine editions of classic texts included an edition of Aeschylus with illustrations by the renowned Italian printmaker Domenico Cunego, the rare Aldine edition of Cicero’s De Philosophia published at Venice in 1541, and a sixteenth-century Greek/Latin parallel text edition of Aesop’s Fables. That year there were a few empty slots in the Poplar Forest library: Jefferson had recently loaned
Francis Eppes his miniature editions of Euripides, Sophocles, and Aeschylus, leaving them at Flood’s so that Francis could pick them up there when he passed that way. Sending the tragedies of these three authors to his grandson, Jefferson advised, “The 1st. you will find easy, the 2d. tolerable so; the last incomprehensible in his flights among the clouds.”38

  The Poplar Forest library also included a number of French and Italian authors. Jefferson’s collection of French authors included works from many longtime favorites—Corneille, Diderot, Molière, Montesquieu, Voltaire—and some breezier works, such as the scandalous works of the famous seventeenth-century courtesan Ninon de Lenclos. Besides Pietro Metastasio, Jefferson’s collection of Italian poetry included works by such authors as Ariosto, Guarini, Petrarch, and Tasso. Ellen remembered him reading Dante, too.39

  Also included in his library were new editions of old favorites, including an 1817 Edinburgh edition of Lord Kames’s Elements of Criticism, the 1819 Madrid edition of Gil Blas, an edition of Ossian, a six-volume edition of Laurence Sterne’s Works, and the 1819 edition of F. D. Philidor’s Chess Rendered Familiar by Tabular Demonstrations of the Various Positions and Movements, which described many different “critical situations and moves” and provided a general introduction to the game by J. G. Pohlman. Playing chess was obviously another frequent activity at Poplar Forest. Jefferson’s vacation library also included a new edition of a work by his old friend Madame de Staël, De la Littérature Considérée dans ses Rapports avec les Institutions Sociales, which surveyed the literary past in a groundbreaking effort to discern the relationship between literature and society.40

  Jefferson kept some basic books on mathematics, chemistry, and history at his vacation home, as well, but of all the libraries he assembled in his lifetime, the Poplar Forest collection was the most purely belletristic. The only surviving catalogue of this library is a brief sales catalogue made decades later when it was sold. His granddaughters’ letters reveal that Jefferson catalogued the Poplar Forest library himself. This is no surprise. It would have been more astonishing if Jefferson had not catalogued the library.

  A letter Cornelia wrote from Poplar Forest in 1817 confirms how carefully he organized this library. She had been planning to spend one day copying the illustration of Desdemona from her grandfather’s copy of Othello. Instead, she and Ellen had to “put numbers” onto all of the books.41 Numbering the books in his library was the second step in Jefferson’s cataloging process, coming after the books were physically arranged on the shelves in the proper order but before the catalogue itself was written.

  Jefferson allowed much time for reading at Poplar Forest. His daily vacation schedule was much the same as his Monticello routine. After a long, leisurely breakfast consisting of good food and good conversation, he and his family would go their separate ways until the afternoon, when they would gather for dinner. After dinner, Jefferson would retire for a few hours. He would spend the late afternoon into the evening with his grandchildren. They would go to bed around nine.

  Her grandfather’s conversation greatly impressed Ellen, who enjoyed not only what he said but also how he listened. She remembered, “He seemed really to take as much pleasure in these conversations with us, as if we had been older and wiser people.” Ellen “not only listened with intense interest to all he said, but answered with perfect freedom,” conveying her own opinions, asking questions, and making remarks. Spending time with her grandfather at Poplar Forest, she “felt as free and as happy as if I had been with companions of my own age.”42

  Ellen also remembered the subjects her grandfather discussed during their time at Poplar Forest: “He would talk to us about his own youth and early friends, and tell us stories of former days…. His conversation was at this time particularly pleasant—easy, flowing and full of anecdote.”43 Ellen’s reminiscence offers additional testimony to Jefferson’s fondness for anecdotes. Her account of their conversation shows what happened to all those wonderful anecdotes Jefferson omitted from the autobiography: he withheld them to tell his family. The story of his private life Jefferson saved for a private audience.

  Once the family came together in the late afternoon, they stayed together until bedtime. They often went outdoors at dusk. Describing a typical evening activity in a letter to his daughter from Poplar Forest, Jefferson wrote, “About twilight of the evening, we sally out with the owls and bats, and take our evening exercise on the terras.”44 There was a new moon on May 1 that year. Imagine how extraordinary the stars looked from the terrace of their remote home at Poplar Forest.

  After they came indoors, his granddaughters would bring him his tea, and they would sit together quietly, all reading. Ellen, again: “He would take his book from which he would occasionally look up to make a remark, to question us about what we were reading, or perhaps to read aloud to us from his own book, some passage which had struck him, and of which he wished to give us the benefit.” Reading plays was a popular evening activity. Cornelia’s interest in Othello suggests that reading Shakespeare was a regular activity at Poplar Forest. Ellen admitted that it was her grandfather who exposed her to Shakespeare. He even presented her with the first copy of Shakespeare she ever owned. Ellen’s reminiscence does not say which edition of Shakespeare her grandfather bought for her. More than likely, he gave her John Sharpe’s tiny nine-volume edition, The Plays of William Shakespeare in Miniature, which he had ordered in 1807 but which does not appear in his own library catalogue.45

  One year at Poplar Forest Cornelia was reading Shakespeare with a purpose: she was planning a home theatrical. She wrote Virginia suggesting possible titles they might perform and offering advice on how to adapt the plays to suit the players. Macbeth, she said, had to be trimmed down significantly. But there was a danger in abridging the play. Shrewdly, Cornelia observed that what is tragic in the original could become comic in an abridgment. If they wanted to do a comedy instead, The Taming of the Shrew was one of her favorites. She also liked King Lear very much. In fact, Lear might be the best play of Shakespeare’s for the family to perform. With Lear’s three daughters, there were plenty of good female roles. Some of the minor male roles—such as the husbands of Regan and Goneril—could be eliminated altogether. Their brothers could play the major male roles: Kent, Gloucester, and Lear. Who should play Lear? Well, that part could go to whomever “chose to rave.”46

  That year they returned to Monticello on May 6. Within two weeks, Jefferson was back at work on the autobiography. Reaching the period of the French Revolution, he appears genuinely pleased to have something besides himself to discuss. Though Jefferson’s autobiography is one of the finest firsthand accounts of the French Revolution available, as autobiography it is frustrating. Once he introduces this subject, he disappears from the narrative for several pages.

  Upon relating the story of the French Revolution, Jefferson admitted that the minuteness of his account was “disproportionate to the general scale of my narrative. But,” he continued, “I have thought it justified by the interest which the whole world must take in this revolution.”47 Jefferson shrewdly understood how important the story of the French Revolution was, yet he continually underestimated the importance of his own life story. Though a delegate to the Continental Congress, author of the Declaration of Independence, governor of Virginia, author of Notes on the State of Virginia, minister plenipotentiary to France, secretary of state, vice president, and president of the United States, Jefferson seems unwilling to admit that the whole world took interest in the story of his life.

  The autobiography ends with Jefferson’s journey from Virginia to New York after his appointment as secretary of state, during which he saw Benjamin Franklin for the last time. He related their conversation about the autobiography Franklin was writing: “I told him I had learnt with much pleasure that, since his return to America, he had been occupied in preparing for the world the history of his own life.”48 Jefferson then related how Franklin presented him with a fragment of his autobiog
raphy and insisted he keep it. After Franklin’s death, Jefferson had returned the manuscript to his grandson, William Temple Franklin. Ever since then, Jefferson had wondered what had happened to the manuscript and questioned whether he should have given the manuscript to Temple Franklin, who virtually turned his back on America after his grandfather’s death.

  Continuing his own autobiography, Jefferson tried to remember as best as he could what had been in the autobiographical fragment Franklin had given him. Filling a gap in Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography seems like a strange thing for Thomas Jefferson to do within the pages of his own autobiography, but this section, too, represents an effort to correct what he perceived as an error on his part. Jefferson always regretted the loss of historical documents and sought to safeguard them as best he could. Even as he related an episode from Franklin’s life, he revealed something of himself: his profound belief in the importance of primary documents to the telling of history.

  Jefferson’s autobiography ends in anticlimax. After discussing Franklin at length, he added one more sentence—“I arrived at New York on the 21st. of Mar. where Congress was in session”—followed by the statement: “So far, July 29. 21.” Having spent nearly seven months on the task, Jefferson was tired of writing about himself. His “So far” hints that he might return to finish the story of his life at a later date. He never did.

  The reason Jefferson stopped when he did is not hard to fathom: the next phase of his life, his tenure as secretary of state, he had already written. “Explanations of the 3. Volumes Bound in Marbled Paper” discusses his early experiences as secretary of state, and The Anas fills in the remainder of the story. His time as vice president and president could be omitted by much the same excuse he had used to avoid telling the story of his governorship. To write the story of his life as vice president and president of the United States would be to write the public history of the nation.