Jefferson’s Design for His Epitaph. (Library of Congress, Manuscripts Division)
Besides Lingard’s History of England, Poe also read John Marshall’s Life of George Washington, another work Jefferson talked much about—but not in a good way. Whereas Jefferson recommended that students read Lingard’s history, he cautioned them about reading Marshall’s biography. Neither of these books was required for Poe’s coursework in ancient and modern languages. Reading both, he was doing just what Jefferson wanted students to do: read on their own and think on their own. Though only a first-year student, Poe chose to be examined with the seniors and earned honors in both Latin and French.41 The time Poe spent at Jefferson’s university helped prepare him for a life of writing.
In a short story titled “The Power of Words,” Poe suggested that words can exist indefinitely. Once uttered, a phrase can trigger a series of reactions with extraordinary, far-reaching, unimaginable results. Words even have the power to alter the physical universe. The words one character speaks in Poe’s story ultimately create a whole new world. Poe was writing fantasy, of course, but it is not difficult to find a real-world equivalent in Thomas Jefferson’s life and work. What Jefferson wrote more than two hundred years ago lives on today. His writings continue to influence people across the United States and around the globe. The powerful words of Thomas Jefferson created a nation and pointed the world toward democracy.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The Road to Monticello makes use of a largely unutilized source in Jefferson studies, that is, the marginalia in books that survive from his library. I am grateful to the staff of the Rare Book and Special Collections Reading Room at the Library of Congress for all of their help. Many books formerly in Jefferson’s possession also survive at the University of Virginia, and I thank the staff of the Special Collections department there for all of their help, especially since they were in the process of moving to their fine new building during my stay in Charlottesville. The American Philosophical Society also has books in its collections from Jefferson’s retirement library that contain his marginalia. I thank Roy Goodman for all of his help at the American Philosophical Society.
I also thank other libraries for their assistance and cordiality: Colonial Williamsburg, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Huntington Library, Library Company of Philadelphia, and the Virginia Historical Society. A special thanks goes to the Interlibrary Loan department at the Max Chambers Library, University of Central Oklahoma, which was instrumental in obtaining many hard-to-find items.
My wife, Myung-Sook, patiently shared me with “Jeffy” for more than five years.
This book is dedicated to my parents. They did not realize what they were starting when they took me to Colonial Williamsburg as a boy thirty-seven years ago. Or maybe they did.
AN ESSAY ON SOURCES
Eighty years have passed since John Livingston Lowes first published The Road to Xanadu, a landmark study of the mind of Samuel Coleridge. Lowes’s basic purpose was to study what books Coleridge read in order to determine how they shaped his life and work. The Road to Monticello shares a similar purpose: to study what Thomas Jefferson read and what he wrote to show how the written word shaped his life. My title deliberately echoes Lowes’s to express my indebtedness to his work. Though The Road to Xanadu has helped inspire The Road to Monticello, a number of other essential works also deserve mention.
Anyone who has made a cursory study of Jefferson scholarship knows E. Millicent Sowerby’s magnificent Catalogue of the Library of Thomas Jefferson. Though a scholarly landmark, Sowerby’s Catalogue, paradoxically, has sometimes proven to be a barrier to further study. It is so detailed that some readers have assumed that it is the last word on Jefferson’s library. Nothing could be further from the truth. Despite the length of the completed work, Sowerby’s assignment was fairly narrow. The Library of Congress assigned her the task of identifying and cataloguing the books from Jefferson’s great library that Congress purchased in 1815. She did not attempt to identify the books Congress did not receive. She did not reconstruct the Shadwell library, which was largely destroyed in the fire of 1770. She did not reconstruct Jefferson’s Annapolis library, which he sold to James Monroe. She did not reconstruct his vacation library at Poplar Forest. She did not reconstruct his retirement library. Nor did she consider books belonging to the family members who lived at Monticello.
These comments are meant to explain Sowerby’s work, not to diminish her achievement. Her catalogue of Jefferson’s library remains the fullest repository of information for understanding the life of his mind. Furthermore, it has served as a model for the catalogues of several other prominent bookmen in early America. As Edwin Wolf II observed in his preface to a reissue of Sowerby’s autobiography, Rare People and Rare Books, “She created a monument, a monument flawed …by characteristically Sowerbian impatience with detail, but she had a grand scheme.” The Road to Monticello makes extensive use of Sowerby’s Catalogue. To keep the notes to a minimum, I cite Sowerby only when I have taken information or quoted from her annotations to the catalogue.
No one can write about Jefferson without expressing gratitude to Princeton University Press and the editors of The Papers of Thomas Jefferson. Begun by Julian P. Boyd with the release of the first volume in 1950, Papers is now thirty-two volumes strong, and it has made it only through the year 1800. The papers of Jefferson’s presidency are yet to come. In addition, Princeton University Press has issued a number of separate works as part of the Second Series of Jefferson’s Papers. Each edited by a different editor or set of editors, all are models of scholarship. Douglas L. Wilson’s edition, Jefferson’s Literary Commonplace Book, has been most valuable for the present work, but the other volumes in the Second Series have also been useful. Memorandum Books, edited by James A. Bear, Jr., and Lucia C. Stanton, is a magisterial work. In 2004, a new phase in the Jefferson Papers was inaugurated with the publication of the first volume of the Retirement Series under the general editorship of J. Jefferson Looney. If the first volume is any indication, the Retirement Series will sustain the high quality of scholarship Julian P. Boyd established more than a half century ago.
Whenever possible, I have cited primary texts from the Princeton edition of Jefferson’s Papers, but because the Princeton edition, except for the initial volume of the Retirement Series, has yet to cover the last quarter century of Jefferson’s life, I cite numerous other sources, too. Four multivolume editions of Jefferson’s collected writings preceded Papers. In 1829, Jefferson’s grandson Thomas Jefferson Randolph published the first collected edition of his writings, the four-volume Memoir, Correspondence, and Miscellanies, from the Papers of Thomas Jefferson, the edition Thomas Peacock called “one of the most important publications ever presented to the world” (Westminster Review 13 [1830]: 312). In 1859, H. A. Washington published a nine-volume edition, The Writings of Thomas Jefferson. In the 1890s, Paul Leicester Ford issued a ten-volume edition, The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, which was rereleased in a twelve-volume collector’s edition in 1904. In 1903–1905, Andrew A. Lipscomb and Albert E. Bergh issued The Writings of Thomas Jefferson in twenty volumes. All of these editions are now available online in fully searchable texts.
A number of other scholarly editions of Jefferson letters are more specific in scope. These include Family Letters of Thomas Jefferson, an edition of Jefferson’s letters to his daughters and grandchildren and their letters to him edited by Edwin M. Betts and James A. Bear; Lester J. Cappon’s Adams-Jefferson Letters, which presents the complete correspondence between Thomas Jefferson and Abigail and John Adams; Worthington Chauncey Ford’s Thomas Jefferson Correspondence, an edition of letters from the collections of William K. Bixby; Donald D. Jackson’s Letters of the Lewis and Clark Expedition; Writings, Merrill D. Peterson’s Library of America edition; James Morton Smith’s Republic of Letters, a three-volume edition of the correspondence between Thomas Jefferson and James Madison; and many, many others.
The protocol I f
ollowed for documentation in The Road to Monticello was to cite Jefferson’s writings from the Papers if possible; if a document was unavailable in the Papers, then I cited one of the more specific scholarly editions; if a document was unavailable in either the Papers or the more specific collections, I then cited one of the older collected editions, in the following priority: Ford, Washington, Randolph, Lipscomb and Bergh. Although the Lipscomb and Bergh edition is the fullest collected edition before the Papers, it is quite weak in terms of its editorial standards and generally should be avoided if possible.
With my documentation, I have tried to strike a balance between giving credit where credit is due and telling a good story. In other words, I have avoided placing a note directly after the most dramatic moments in this book, the reconstructed bits of conversation. I never could bring myself to place a note number directly after an exclamation mark, either. In these cases, the documentation is usually tucked into the preceding note. In the quotations themselves, I have silently emended a few of Jefferson’s idiosyncrasies: his use of “it’s” for “its” and his disuse of capital letters to start sentences—whenever necessary, I have changed Jefferson’s lowercase letters to capitals. And sometimes I have silently expanded abbreviations whenever necessary for clarity.
Much of Jefferson’s correspondence remains unpublished. The fullest collection of letters survives in the Manuscripts Division of the Library of Congress. I am grateful for the help I received when I visited the Library of Congress in 2004. I am also pleased that so much of Jefferson’s unpublished correspondence has been made available online in facsimile as part of the American Memory project. Another extraordinary online collection, the Family Letters Project, presents the correspondence of Thomas Jefferson’s extended family in facsimile and transcription.
Numerous biographies of Thomas Jefferson have preceded this one. Henry S. Randall’s three-volume biography, The Life of Thomas Jefferson, which first appeared in 1858, was the fullest biography written to that date. It suffers from the same flaws of most large nineteenth-century biographies: Randall was a powerful writer in his own right, but all too often he let his quotations bear the burden of biography. Still, his work remains useful for those long quotations. He corresponded with Jefferson’s grandchildren and many others who knew him and were still alive in the 1850s. Randall’s biography largely determined the course of Jefferson biography for the next century. Writing in 1943 in Jefferson: The Road to Glory, 1743–1776, the first volume of her multivolume biography, Marie Kimball observed, “The majority of more recent biographies are little more than a paraphrase and condensation of Randall.” Kimball released two subsequent volumes but did not live to see her biography to completion. Dumas Malone released the first volume of his multivolume biography, Jefferson and His Time, in 1948, five years after Kimball’s first volume. Malone did live long enough to see his biography to completion when the sixth and last volume appeared in 1981. Something similar to what Kimball said about biographies since Randall’s can now be said about biographies since Malone’s. The majority of them are little more than a paraphrase and condensation of Malone.
Though there have been dozens of Jefferson biographies, remarkably, there has never been a literary biography until now. This is not to say that Jefferson’s biographers have ignored the place of literature in his life, but literature has typically been treated solely as a means of exploring other aspects of Jefferson’s life. In The Inner Jefferson: Portrait of a Grieving Optimist (1995), for example, Andrew Burstein examines Jefferson as a letter writer and also takes a look at his reading of Laurence Sterne. In his follow-up study, Jefferson’s Secrets: Death and Desire at Monticello (2005), Burstein begins by arguing that the medical books in Jefferson’s library, few as they were, contributed significantly to his way of thinking. Though Burstein deals with Jefferson as both reader and writer in these two works, his purpose is not to emphasize the importance of literature but rather to use Jefferson’s literary interests as a starting point to plumb the depths of his mind or, in Burstein’s words, to “crack the shell and find an internal energy, a man both imaginative and emotional, who stands up to dissection” (p. xiii).
The purpose of The Road to Monticello is much different. It is based on the fundamental belief that literature is important in and of itself and that a literary life is a life worth living. Jefferson was a multifaceted man whose literary life is significant regardless how it touched other aspects of his life. Literary biography is important for the same reasons literary history is important: it shows the importance of this art form known as literature to the life of man. Some good work has been done previously in this regard, especially by Douglas L. Wilson, who has written on the classical foundations of Jefferson agrarianism, Jefferson’s early notebooks, Jefferson’s library, the composition of Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson and the Republic of Letters, and Jefferson and French literature. The Road to Monticello combines previous scholarship with new information to tell the detailed story of Jefferson’s life of the mind.
Abbreviations
The following abbreviations are used in the documentation to indicate frequently cited sources:
AJL
The Adams-Jefferson Letters: The Complete Correspondence between Thomas Jefferson and Abigail and John Adams. Ed. Lester J. Cappon. 1959. Reprint; Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987.
ANB
American National Biography. Ed. John A. Garraty and Mark C. Carnes. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. 24 vols.
Bernard, Retrospections
Bernard, John. Retrospections of America, 1797– 1811. Ed. Mrs. Bayle Bernard. New York: Harper & Bros., 1887.
Cabell
Cabell, Nathaniel Francis, ed. Early History of the University of Virginia as Contained in the Letters of Thomas Jefferson and Joseph C. Cabell. Richmond: J. W. Randolph, 1856.
Daybooks
Virginia Gazette Daybooks, 1750–1752 & 1764–1766. Ed. Paul P. Hoffman. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Library, 1967.
DLC
Library of Congress.
EG
Jefferson’s Extracts from the Gospels: “The Philosophy of Jesus” and “The Life and Morals of Jesus.” Ed. Dickinson W. Adams and Ruth W. Lester. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983.
Family Letters
Family Letters of Thomas Jefferson. Ed. Edwin M. Betts and James A. Bear, Jr. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1966.
First Forty Years
Smith, Margaret Bayard. The First Forty Years of Washington Society. Ed. Gaillard Hunt. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1906.
FLP
Family Letters Project: The Correspondence of Thomas Jefferson’s Family Members. 2006.http://familyletters.dataformat.com.
Ford
Ford, Paul Leicester, ed. The Writings of Thomas Jefferson. Federal Edition. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1904–1905. 12 vols.
Gribbel
Gribbel, John, ed. Reminiscences of Patrick Henry in the Letters of Thomas Jefferson to William Wirt. Philadelphia: John Gribbel, 1911.
Jackson
Jackson, Donald D., ed. Letters of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, with Related Documents, 1783–1854. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1962.
Jefferson at Monticello
Jefferson at Monticello: Memoirs of a Monticello Slave, as Dictated to Charles Campbell by Isaac … The Private Life of Thomas Jefferson by Rev. Hamilton Wilcox Pierson. Ed. James A. Bear, Jr. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1967.
L&B
Lipscomb, Andrew A., and Albert E. Bergh, eds. The Writings of Thomas Jefferson. Washington, D.C.: Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association of the United States, 1903–1905. 20 vols.
LCB
Jefferson’s Literary Commonplace Book. Ed. Douglas L. Wilson. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989.
LDC
Letters of Delegates to Congress, 1774–1789. Ed. Paul Hubert Smith and Ronald M. Gephart
. Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1976–2000. 26 vols.
Memorandum Books
Jefferson’s Memorandum Books: Accounts, with Legal Records and Miscellany, 1767–1826. Ed. James A. Bear, Jr., and Lucia C. Stanton. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997. 2 vols.
NSV
Notes on the State of Virginia. Ed. William Peden. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1955.
ODNB
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. 60 vols.
Papers
The Papers of Thomas Jefferson. Ed. Julian P. Boyd et al. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1950–. 32 vols. to date.
PTJRS
The Papers of Thomas Jefferson: Retirement Series. Ed. J. Jefferson Looney et al. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004–. 1 vol. to date.
Randall
Randall, Henry S. The Life of Thomas Jefferson. New York: Derby & Jackson, 1858. 3 vols.
Sowerby
Sowerby, E. Millicent. Catalogue of the Library of Thomas Jefferson. Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1952–1959. 5 vols.
VMHB
Virginia Magazine of History and Biography.
Washington
Washington, H. A., ed. The Writings of Thomas Jefferson: Being His Autobiography, Correspondence, Reports, Messages, Addresses, and Other Writings, Official and Private. New York: Derby & Jackson, 1859. 9 vols.
The Road to Monticello Page 84