Joseph Coolidge became one of Jefferson’s regular correspondents, too. The letters to Joseph and those to Ellen parallel letters Jefferson had written husbands and wives in the past. Men received stories of conflict; women were treated with pictures of harmony. The night of October 1, 1825, a riot broke out on the University of Virginia campus. Jefferson wrote Joseph about it on October 13, shortly after punishment had been meted out. He did not write Ellen about the incident until the following month when the matter had cooled down. Instead of providing any more details to her, her grandfather described the state of the university now that the crisis had subsided: “A perfect subordination has succeeded, entire respect towards the Professors, and industry, order, and quiet the most exemplary, has prevailed ever since.”27
In his letter to Joseph, on the other hand, Jefferson related the story of the riot. Fourteen students “animated first with wine, masked themselves so as not to be known, and turned out on the lawn of the University, with no intention, it is believed, but of childish noise and uproar.” When two professors went to investigate, the students insulted them and even threw stones at them. The two professors each seized an offender. Before they could discern their identities, the students escaped. Ultimately, all fourteen culprits were identified. Three were expelled; the others were reprimanded. Toward the end of his letter, Jefferson mentioned one of the three in more detail, “My dear Ellen may be told that at the head of the expelled, as of the riot, was W. M. C., expelled from two other seminaries before.”28
This last sentence helps explain the differences between the two letters. Jefferson related the story of the riot to his grandson-in-law but left him to decide how to tell his wife. Jefferson did not forbid Joseph from telling Ellen about the riot, but he did give him the responsibility of mediating the story for her. Even as he told Joseph the story, Jefferson shaped it to soften its details and make it more abstract. He identified one culprit by his initials but kept the others anonymous. The two professors who confronted the students remain anonymous in Jefferson’s account. Attributing the riot to general childishness, Jefferson further softened the story. If he had his way, Ellen would receive a twice-filtered version of the story, one that he softened in his letter to Joseph, which Joseph would soften himself as he related it to Ellen.
As things turned out, Ellen received the whole, unfiltered story from her mother, who had written her the same day Jefferson wrote Joseph. Martha named not only the two professors (Tucker and Emmett), but also the three students who were expelled (Ayre, Cary, and Thompson). Furthermore, she mentioned another incident that had occurred the night before the October 1 riot, when “a young Man of the name of Ayre, a rich fool, threw a bottle, with a pack of cards in Mr Long’s window [and] cursed the ‘European professors.’ ”29 In his letter to Joseph, Jefferson did not mention this incident at all. He could not have done so without undermining the general motive of childishness he attributed to the rioters. Martha also wrote that Professors Long and Key, weary of coping with the unruly students, had submitted their resignations. Jefferson had said nothing about this in his letter, either. (Holding them to their contracts, the board of visitors refused to accept their resignations.)
Jefferson was an eternal optimist. He told the story of the riot in as positive a light as possible. He was convinced that everything would turn out fine. Though he respected the intelligence of both Joseph and Ellen, he told the story the way he did not only to protect Ellen’s delicate sensibilities but also to emphasize his authority. As both patriarch of the family and rector of the university, he was the one ultimately in charge of maintaining order. Martha, on the other hand, wrote to capture the drama of the moment. She loved and respected her father, but she did not find it necessary to hide facts from her daughter to protect her father’s image of authority. In her eyes, his authority was so firmly established that no amount of bad news could tarnish it. Martha saw nothing wrong with depicting him as he was, even down to his frailties. That fall, in fact, he was quite ill, and Martha said so. He had been sick before the riot, which now exacerbated his illness. Martha told Ellen, “Your dear Grand father is not so well. The fatigue of the last week has thrown him back a good deal and obliged me to encrease his nightly dose of laudanum to 100 drops.”30
Though Jefferson had little respect for physicians in general, he was impressed with Dr. Dunglison, who attended him regularly that fall. By late November, Jefferson health improved considerably. Writing to Ellen again, Martha explained, “My father’s health is wonderfully improved but as usual when he gets better he will venture too far and injures him self. He had ridden 5 miles on horse back without inconvenience, and extending it still farther he fatigued him self and passed a bad night, but he is again recovering from it and I hope will be more cautious; the doctor has always protested against exercise on horseback.” In a postscript, she informed Ellen that they had just heard that Bernhard, Duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, had arrived in Charlottesville that day. “Of course,” she wrote, we “shall have him for dinner.”31 They dispatched a messenger to town to extend the invitation to him. He happily accepted.
The duke’s Travels through North America provides a good indication of the state of the university and its rector that November. The duke apparently took a self-guided tour of the campus. The Rotunda remained unfinished, but he recognized its similarity to the Pantheon and could see its potential: “The interior of the library was not yet finished, but according to its plan it will be a beautiful one.” He disliked the design of the pavilions: “As for the rest, the ten buildings on the right and left are not at all regularly built, but each of them in a different manner, so that there is no harmony in the whole, which prevents it from having a beautiful and majestic appearance.”32
Without a guide, the duke had no one to tell him that such irregularity was intentional. The University of Virginia campus was a living museum: each pavilion was different to teach students the different styles of architecture. Though critical, the duke’s description shows that the university’s architectural style, like so much of Jefferson’s creative work, combined elements of classicism and Romanticism. The Pantheon-inspired Rotunda aligned the campus within the classical tradition, but the irregularity of the pavilions, along with other irregular features such as the crooked garden walls, which the duke liked very much, aligned it with Romanticism, the celebration of irregularity being one of its defining characteristics.
By chance, the duke and his party encountered Dr. Dunglison, who introduced himself and showed them the library, currently housed in Pavilion VII. The library “was still inconsiderable,” the duke noted, but it was accumulating a good collection of German books. Dunglison showed him several belletristic works, including Almanach Dramatischer Spiele zur Geselligen Unterhaltung auf dem Lande, the dramatic yearbook August von Kotzebue founded in 1803 and had continued editing since then. Furthermore, Dunglison informed him that many more books were on their way.
Unable to find transportation from Charlottesville to Monticello, the duke had to walk three miles. He arrived just as dinner was being served. Jefferson rose from the table and came to greet him and his party. The duke was a big, strapping fellow. William Wirt, who had dined with him in Baltimore, called him “brawny, muscular, and of herculean strength.” He looked “like a Russian, or one of those gigantic Cossacks.” The duke was flattered when Jefferson “ordered dinner to be served up anew” upon his arrival.33
The dinner company that evening included Martha, Professor Key, and his wife Sarah. Though Professor Key had tried to resign from the university the previous month, Jefferson, through sheer force of personality, had reconciled him to staying. The duke was thoroughly impressed with the master of Monticello: “In conversation he was very lively, and his spirits, as also his hearing and sight, seemed not to have decreased at all with his advancing age. I found in him a man who retained his faculties remarkably well in his old age, and one would have taken him for a man of sixty.”34
Afte
r dinner, Jefferson invited the duke to stay the night. The evening proved to be absolutely delightful. Sitting by the fire, Jefferson and his guests discussed natural history, the fine arts, and travel. Jefferson “spoke also of his travels in France, and the country on the Rhine, where he was very much pleased.”
As the first school year ended in December, Jefferson looked forward to the next one, which would begin in February after a winter break. The University of Virginia had gone without a chair in law for the first year, but that fall Jefferson offered it to Gilmer again, who accepted the position this time. Sadly, he would not live to fill the chair. He died the month the second year began.
One of the most progressive aspects of Jefferson’s curriculum concerned the amount of personal choice students had when it came to designing their own course of study. They could choose whatever courses they wished. Edgar Allan Poe, the most famous student who entered the university during its second year, took Professor Long’s Ancient Languages and Professor Blaetterman’s Modern Languages. Poe greatly appreciated the intellectual life the University of Virginia offered. He joined a club called the Jefferson Literary Society and became its secretary. Members discussed books they had read, made recommendations for reading, and shared writings of their own composition.35
Though Jefferson often invited students to dinner at Monticello, there is no direct evidence that Poe dined with him. According to another student who did, Jefferson’s dinner invitations were both systematic and insistent. If a student were unable to visit Monticello when invited, Jefferson made sure to invite him again. During these dinners, he would talk books with the students and offer them reading advice. The books Poe read at the University of Virginia provide the most suggestive evidence that he received literary advice from Jefferson and acted upon it: they include John Lingard’s History of England.36
Jefferson turned eighty-three on April 13, 1826. He remained in fairly good health and was still riding every day. Jeff Randolph recalled, “He retained to the last his fondness for riding on horseback; he rode within three weeks of his death, when from disease, debility and age, he mounted with difficulty.”37 In June, he received an invitation from General Weightman, the mayor of Washington, D.C., to attend the fiftieth anniversary celebration of the Declaration of Independence on July 4. Jefferson responded on June 24, refusing the invitation but offering some spirited comments on the importance of the event.
Jeff Randolph, Nicholas Trist, and Dr. Dunglison, all of whom attended Jefferson during his last days, each left detailed accounts of the experience, and their accounts closely coincide.38 To be sure, no one nursed him more during his final days than his daughter Martha, but she could never bring herself to write about her father’s death, so her whereabouts during his last illness has escaped history.
Dr. Dunglison wrote that on Sunday, July 2, Jefferson was affected with stupor, experiencing “intervals of wakefulness and consciousness.” On Monday, the third, the stupor became almost permanent. About seven o’clock that evening, Jefferson awoke to see Dr. Dunglison at his bedside.
“Ah! Doctor, are you still there?” he asked. The doctor could scarcely make out his words. His voice was husky and indistinct. “Is it the 4th?”
“It soon will be,” the doctor replied.
While seated by his bedside around eleven o’clock that evening, Nicholas Trist heard him ask the same question.
“This is the Fourth?”
Trist could tell that Jefferson was just trying to hang on until the Fourth of July. He could not bear to tell him it was not, so he ignored the question.
“This is the Fourth?” Jefferson asked again.
The Fourth remained an hour away, but Trist could no longer bear watching his father-in-law suffer in agony. Trist nodded.
“Ah,” Jefferson murmured, “just as I wished.”
His family recognized the significance of Jefferson living until the Fourth of July, but with only one hour to go, they were not sure he was going to make it. Jeff Randolph soon entered his room. He remembered, “As twelve o’clock at night approached, we anxiously desired that his death should be hallowed by the Anniversary of Independence. At fifteen minutes before twelve we stood noting the minute hand of the watch, hoping a few minutes of prolonged life.” Jefferson lapsed into a stupor once more, but as the sun rose on July 4, 1826, he still lived.
Seated by his bedside later that morning, Nicholas Trist knew it was just a matter of hours. He put pen to paper and wrote a letter to Joseph Coolidge. Dated “His bedside, July 4th, 1826, 9.15, a.m.,” Trist’s letter begins, “There is no longer any doubt, unless one chance to a hundred thousand, or a million, may be ground for doubt. He has been dying since yesterday morning; and until twelve o’clock last night, we were in momentary fear that he would not live, as he desired, to see his own glorious Fourth. It has come at last; and he is still alive, if we can apply the word to one who is all but dead. He has been to the last, the same, calm, clear-minded, amiable philosopher.”
About eleven o’clock, as Jeff Randolph remembered, his grandfather looked toward him and slightly moved his lips. Jeff applied a wet sponge to his mouth, “which he sucked and appeared to relish—this was the last evidence he gave of consciousness.” At 12:50 that afternoon, Thomas Jefferson breathed his last.
A parallel scene was taking place simultaneously to the north in Quincy, Massachusetts. This afternoon, John Adams lay on his deathbed, too. He expired at 6:20 that evening.
When the news got out that both Thomas Jefferson and John Adams had died on the same day and that day happened to be July 4, 1826, the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, many Americans saw it as a sign from God, a divine blessing of the United States and all that it represented.39
God had nothing to do with it. The fact that both Thomas Jefferson and John Adams survived until July 4, 1826, indicates that these were two great men, strong of mind, strong of body, strong of will: both proud of having signed the Declaration of Independence, both proud of their contributions to their nation and to the development of democracy, and both with the will, the endurance, the patience, the sheer stubbornness to live long enough to witness the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the United States of America.
Ever disdainful of ceremony, Jefferson wanted his burial to be “private, without parade.” The family did not send out funeral notices, but somehow the word got out. His casket was borne from Monticello to the private cemetery a little way down the hill, where a huge crowd of friends and neighbors had gathered.
Jefferson wrote his own epitaph:
HERE WAS BURIED
THOMAS JEFFERSON
AUTHOR OF THE
DECLARATION
OF
AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE
of the
STATUTE OF VIRGINIA
FOR
RELIGIOUS FREEDOM
AND FATHER OF THE
UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA
The spare quality of this epitaph has puzzled many people, who cannot understand why he made no mention of the fact that he was president of the United States, vice president, secretary of state, minister plenipotentiary to France, or president of the American Philosophical Society. But his neglect of these roles in his epitaph is consistent with the longstanding discomfort Jefferson experienced when writing about himself. The accomplishments he did list were more important to him and much more fundamental.
Again laying personal claim to the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson expressed his pride in creating the document that shook off the yoke of monarchy and tyranny, brought the Enlightenment to politics, and established the world’s first modern democracy. The Statute for Religious Freedom he saw as a parallel document to the Declaration. Whereas the Declaration let man break free from political tyranny, the Statute for Religious Freedom let man break free from religious tyranny. Education offered the best way to ensure and perpetuate democracy. Naming himself the father of the University of Virginia, he conveyed the pride he took in
the institution, but he was also depicting himself as a representative of the powers of education. There is continuity to the three accomplishments he listed in his epitaph. The first two establish democracy and freedom from tyranny. The third ensures that democracy and freedom from tyranny will continue into the future.
Sadly, the father of the University of Virginia did not live long enough to witness the completion of the university library. Even in his final illness, he had continued building the collection. From his deathbed, he wrote Joseph Coolidge asking his help obtaining some additional books for the library. At the time of his death, the library was still housed in Pavilion VII. Once the books were finally moved into the Rotunda, they made an impressive sight. As Edgar Allan Poe observed, “They have nearly finished the Rotunda—The pillars of the Portico are completed and it greatly improves the appearance of the whole—The books are removed into the library—and we have a very fine collection.”40
The Road to Monticello Page 83