Jefferson's Secrets

At the beginning of 1825, Jefferson matter-of-factly informed Virginia physician Andrew Kean, who tended Monticello’s residents when Thomas Watkins was gone from the neighborhood, “I have remaining but a short term of life that may be expected to be made up of infirmities.”¹ As if his medical problems were not real enough, Jefferson almost suffocated to death in an avoidable freak accident in October of that year. An overconfident itinerant sculptor by the name of John Browere had come to Monticello to take a plaster cast of the patriarch’s face for a life mask. He had purportedly done one of Lafayette, with marked success. The willing subject sat back while the sculptor covered his head and neck, and then left the plaster in place for an hour instead of the prescribed twenty minutes.

The family could not bear to witness Grandpapa with his face plaster-covered. Only Burwell Colbert, a grandson of Betty Hemings, and Browere himself were present, and it was Burwell who noted his master’s suffering and jumped up. Browere’s error required the emergency use of a chisel and mallet, which the sculptor handled with neither artistry nor subtlety. “I was taken in by Mr Browere,” Jefferson wrote to his friend James Madison. He described the incompetent sculptor’s confused rescue effort and his own exhaustion, adding (not without wit): “There became real danger that the ears would separate from the head sooner than from the plaster.” Granddaughter Virginia, writing to her sister Ellen, damned Browere as “a vile plasterer.” Jefferson concluded: “I now bid adieu for ever to busts and even portraits.”²

Until Jefferson was close to death, he did not tell his family that he had been suffering from diarrhea, periodically, since early in his presidency, when he had first solicited Dr. Rush for advice. According to Jefferson Randolph, Grandpapa had not wished to worry the family. Perhaps, but diarrhea is not a pleasant subject, and Jefferson might have felt embarrassed talking about his condition to his nearest relatives, whom he saw day in and day out. He readily discussed his other ailments with these loved ones, but not the diarrhea. He was a man who resisted speaking about unpleasantness. He was not the garrulous John Adams, nor the effusive Charles Willson Peale, the latter of whom wrote Jefferson in 1813: “When your Son in Law Mr. [Thomas Mann] Randolph was in Philadelphia lately, I was indisposed with a Diarrhea.” When fellow-sufferer Judge Roane of Richmond queried him about it, Jefferson denoted his problem “the visceral complaint.”

Other than in writing to a physician, or to another victim, Jefferson might have thought such expression indelicate. Whatever the reason, he preferred not to talk about his diarrhea in his own house. As he aged, he grew increasingly compliant with worsening circumstances and was almost laconic when he wrote to Madison, his closest confidant on most issues, during the second half of 1825: “My rides to the University have brought on me great sufferings, reducing my intervals of ease from 45. to 20. minutes.” His pen becomes lighter, less firm, at this point. “This is a good index of the changes which take place.” When another bout with diarrhea instigated Jefferson’s final illness, dysentery was at that moment rampant in Monticello’s neighborhood.³

Irritability of the bladder, Jefferson’s other serious medical condition in 1825—again, rarely broached but with physicians—necessitated self-application of a bougie to make urine flow pain-free. He described dysuria quite directly to his financial adviser and commercial agent in Richmond, Colonel Bernard Peyton, who made payments on his medical paraphernalia: “I am dragging on a tedious case of dysury coincident to senile frames attended with occasional pain, confining me to the house and obliging me to continue chiefly in a recumbent posture.”

“Otherwise,” Jefferson wrote next, in his draft copy of the letter, “my health is as good as ever.” He crossed out “good” and replaced it with, “sound as ever.” Did he consider “good” a misrepresentation? Did “sound,” which one of Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary definitions gives as “not failing,” in effect mean “stable” to Jefferson, that is, an acceptable state given his “senile” condition? Yet Peyton interpreted “sound” at its full value, and replied to his client a few days later: “I was quite relieved & gratified to find your general health still sound, notwithstanding the pain & inconvenience you have been so long subject to. I sincerely hope it will not be of much longer continuance.”⁴ If his intense, chronic, exhausting diarrhea was not the sole cause of Jefferson’s death, then it may have been a combination of diarrhea and an infection from the unsanitary bougies he inserted, on Dr. Dunglison’s recommendation.

Of course, one cannot ignore the physical toll that Jefferson’s worsening personal finances must have taken on him. For years the planter had been frustrated by the terms under which credit was negotiated and interest assessed. When he was newly wed, his father-in-law left him a sizeable estate, with a manageable debt. It became tied to Jefferson’s own estate, and resulted in a liability that was only worsened by his effort to pay in depreciating paper currency during the Revolution. As others among his cohort also found, prices for tobacco and wheat fluctuated, and plantation profits never succeeded in solving the debt crisis.

Then he went abroad, and on his return five years later agreed to hold national office. Owing to his long absences, crop management suffered. The problem of debt grew. In a letter to James Madison in 1789, he said that “the earth belongs in usufruct to the living,” that no generation should have the right to burden the next with inherited debt. Jefferson’s dictum was a moral as much as a policy formulation, and he continued to live by its precepts—no matter how impractical it might be, as Madison assured him it was. As usual, Jefferson reacted emotionally to what he saw happening around him—the effects of debt on his society. Herbert E. Sloan puts it plainly in his study of Jefferson’s views on this tender subject: “Crippled by debt, troubled in spirit, the Virginia gentry of the early nineteenth century presents a picture of moral and financial exhaustion.”⁵

Nonetheless, during his retirement Jefferson remained convinced that he possessed land and slaves worth well more than his accrued debts to European bankers. But he was wrong. The sale of lands in 1810, and his library in 1815, would have meant more had not the nation’s economy taken a tumble in 1819–1820; but by then, Jefferson had secured additional loans from banks in Virginia and endorsed a fateful note on behalf of his luckless friend, Jeff Randolph’s father-in-law Wilson Cary Nicholas. Interest payments swelled.

As the year 1826 opened, only one possibility loomed that held out hope of rescue from his mounting debt and the preservation of Monticello as a home for Jefferson’s surviving family: a lottery by which Jefferson would give up much of his other land. Lotteries had been made illegal in Virginia, and so the ex-president’s friends had to fight in the legislature to make an exception. A humbled Jefferson wrote to his young ally Joseph Cabell and expressed his hope that the rules of the state could be bent slightly: “I can save the house of Monticello and farm adjoining to end my days and bury my bones.” Jefferson’s active enemies were silenced by the oratorical flourishes of those in the Assembly who hailed his “distinguished services” to the nation. The Richmond Enquirer reported: “His name was identified with every thing glorious in the history of our Republic.” Thus Jefferson won enough votes of sympathy that a lottery was advertised that spring, to be managed by his grandson.⁶

By all accounts, Jefferson remained optimistic that the lottery was about to save him. Only after his death did its failure to raise sufficient funds make the sale of Monticello—and the majority of Monticello’s slaves—inevitable. In the third week of June, just as he was urgently calling Dr. Dunglison to his side, he gave some indication of his residual uncertainty when he implored his grandson Jeff never to leave his mother—whether or not Martha retained possession of the mountain estate.⁷

A $500 contribution arrived from William Short, Virginian by birth and now of Philadelphia. In spite of distance, Jefferson’s onetime law student and private secretary remained one of his most trusted friends.⁸ A community of New Yorkers pledged an additional $7,500. As he held on, Jefferson’s spirits were buoyed by the public show of support. Yet, in the words of Theognis, “No one can escape death by paying a ransom.” Jefferson remained firm, if fatalistic. The tokens of love he received at the end of his days allowed his doctor to drug him less than he might otherwise have done.

Opium is the starting material from which morphine and codeine are now extracted. Until the early twentieth century, however, laudanum was the primary medicinal formulation for opium, along with the less-potent paregoric, a camphorated tincture of opium produced in the decades after Jefferson’s death. The essence of opium is contained in the seed capsule of the opium poppy (Papaver somniferum), and is composed of between 2 and 10 percent morphine. When the ripened capsule is pierced, a milky juice oozes from it. As the juice is dried in the air, it darkens, becoming sticky or crumbly: This is “raw opium,” which can be further dried and powdered for medicinal use, or boiled and strained when it is to be smoked in an opium pipe.¹⁰

In his 1803 letter recommending a course of treatment to alleviate the president’s bowel disorder, Benjamin Rush wrote: “To relieve the diarrhoea when troublesome, laudanum should be taken in small doses during the day, and in larger doses at bedtime so as to prevent your being obliged to rise in the night.... In cases of extreme pain, an injection composed of forty drops of laudanum mixed with a tablespoon of starch and half a pint of water will give ease.” He was optimistic: “The laudanum when thus received into the system seldom affects the stomach with sickness or the head with pain afterwards.”¹¹

Many doctors recommended the very concentrated drug in small doses, though Jefferson’s Harvard friend Dr. Benjamin Waterhouse advocated an even more restricted use. Preaching temperance, particularly among young adults, Waterhouse was concerned about the widespread use of narcotics, and he wrote of opium: “After destroying the energy of the stomach, it undermines the power of all the other organs in succession, even to the organ of thought.”¹² Certainly, he was not addressing Jefferson, a man who instinctively recoiled from a loss of self-control. He was concerned about younger people who took up the unhealthy habit of tobacco chewing and smoking and who might imitate the British poets of this period for whom impaired judgment was an acceptable risk as they sought to expand their creative possibilities.

Laudanum operated on both nervous and gastrointestinal systems. If taken too often or in large doses, it did more than block the sensation of pain, control diarrhea, and enable sleep; it decreased the depth and frequency of breathing, caused a loss of appetite, decreased the secretion of sex hormones, and impaired memory. Because in early-nineteenth-century America there was, in general, no moral stigma attached to the use of painkillers, the wide availability of laudanum led some despairing individuals to commit suicide by taking an overdose.

Addiction was known and feared, and opium was already considered more dangerous than alcohol. When “eaten” (a deceptive term, because it was actually consumed in liquid form), the morphine is poorly absorbable across the lining of the stomach, but in the intestines it is gradually absorbed into the bloodstream, and from there passes easily into the brain; thus, the ingested drug is slower to take effect than it is through pipe smoking, which delivers vaporized morphine almost instantly to the brain. “Eating,” however, produces a prolonged sensation, and this explains its appeal to the creative writers who were enthusiasts.¹³

The Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge was an acknowledged opium addict, as was Thomas DeQuincey, whose Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1822) was an instant phenomenon. The poet John Keats, who had received medical training before he turned to publishing verse, was an occasional user. For such literary figures, opium played with past experience and produced new sensations; it stimulated visions, imaginative patterns, and dreams, which, in sentimental form, found their way into print at about this time. DeQuincey wrote that he timed each dose of laudanum so that he could walk the streets and mingle with the London crowds in the early evening when hyper-reality grew and the scale of his fantasies became exaggerated. He would then return home when the drug was about to have its narcotic effect. Indeed, cultivation of the opium poppy for this purpose goes back to antiquity: Greek physicians supplied it, and, in the second century A.D., the Roman emperor and moralist Marcus Aurelius was an opium addict.¹⁴

There is a generally known historical connection between opium and tea. In the second half of the eighteenth century, when the British East India Company began to offload Bengali opium at the southern Chinese port of Canton, in exchange for tea, London was able to reduce the amount of silver leaving the country (the former means of payment for China’s tea). At the same time, the fast-growing Asian opium market discovered the pleasure of dipping American tobacco in an opium solution, and then smoking it. Chinese desire for the Virginia crop made possible increased imports of tea into Virginia, along with the sugar that went into every American cup. So the business that began in Bengal made the slave economy of the sugar-producing Caribbean all the more profitable.¹⁵

Why all this history? Opium, tobacco, sugar, and tea—exchangeable products indispensable to American consumerism and to the continuation of American slavery—became intertwined during the Revolutionary era. These vital products, which had long fed British economic power, were in Jefferson’s fields, in his kitchen, and inside his body, for the greater part of his eighty-three years.

By July 1824, when he opened a correspondence with the ailing Jefferson, Major Henry Lee had reconciled with his wife—who had acquired an embarrassing, nearly incapacitating opium habit—and had sold off the Lee mansion of Stratford. An outspoken supporter of Andrew Jackson’s, he had undertaken to write campaign material on behalf of the candidate from Tennessee, and would eventually move to Nashville and compose Jackson’s first inaugural address. But first, he hoped to make his mark as a writer by revisiting the Memoirs of his father. Gingerly, he courted Jefferson.

Lee advised Jefferson, in early May 1826, that he was editing his father’s account of the Revolution, which in 1812 had called into question Jefferson’s conduct as wartime governor of Virginia. Jefferson welcomed the opportunity to take another crack at rewriting history and to prove, with documentary evidence he kept at Monticello, that Lee’s Memoirs had history wrong. When the son wrote that the account was neglectful of Jefferson’s “foresight or energy,” Jefferson jumped at the chance to widen an apparent opening. Lee proposed to visit Monticello.

“Were your father now living and proposing, as you are to publish a second edition of his Memoirs, I am satisfied he would give a very different aspect to the pages of that work which respect Arnold’s invasion,” Jefferson wrote on May 15. This was entirely consistent with his past approach to “candid” men whom he thought he might reclaim. In 1814, Jefferson had fantasized about getting one more chance to meet George Washington face-to-face, so that he could recover a lost trust: “These malignant insinuations should have been dissipated before his just judgment as mists before the sun,” Jefferson imagined at that time. Using the same language in 1826, he assured that the late General Lee would eventually have come to see the validity of the Jeffersonian position by sifting from “the chaff of the rumors then afloat, rumors which vanished soon before the real truth, as vapors before the sun.”

In a six-page letter to the younger Lee, Jefferson went into detail about his activities back in 1780–1781. All Lee had to do, he said, was to “turn to Girardin’s history of Virginia” for an accurate published account copied from memoranda Jefferson had written at the time “on horseback, and on scraps of paper taken out of my pocket at the moment, fortunately preserved to this day, and now lying before me.” It was a passionate appeal for justice from the son of his earlier traducer. “I would ask as much of your time at Monticello as would enable you to examine these papers at your ease.... All should be laid open to you without reserve, for there is not a truth existing which I fear, or would wish unknown to the whole world.” ¹⁷

Lee made his preparations, thanking Jefferson on May 25 for “the fairness of your explanations respecting my father.” Acknowledging the value of getting all the details right, Lee vowed to do justice to the ex-president. On May 27, Jefferson wrote again, this time with minor adjustments to his narrative of 1780–1781. “I shall be happy to receive you at the time you mention or any other,” Jefferson repeated graciously, eagerly, on May 30.¹⁸

One month later, on or just before July 1, Henry Lee rode up to Monticello, as Jefferson lay on his deathbed. Until powerful doses of laudanum became necessary, and the medication seriously clouded his thoughts, his mind remained clear. Notwithstanding his desperate condition, Jefferson felt the historic mission of converting a pen-wielding political adversary into a friend was important enough that he roused himself and invited Major Lee in to see him. Lee wrote to his patron Andrew Jackson from Monticello on that day, and reported that Jefferson was “confined to his bed with a severe Dysentary, which cannot but place so old a patient in great danger.” Still, the unpredictable writer found Jefferson less sluggish than he had expected, and noted that Martha Jefferson Randolph “hover[ed] round his bed with grief at her heart.” He turned to her at one point and ignorantly commented that it was wrong for her to entrust the care of so great an American to a foreigner such as Dunglison.

On the same day, that “foreigner” wrote with sober assurance to James Madison:

Towards the termination of the last week [Mr. Jefferson] requested my advice in consequence of the increase of a diarrhoea to which he has been for years more or less subject, but which he has generally treated with too much indifference, and it was not until it had made serious inroads on his health that he had any communication with me on the subject. In the course of two or three days the complaint was considerably arrested, but the debility induced was so great as to give rise to symptoms, denoting, too unequivocally, the loss of that elasticity—that power of restoration the existence of which at an earlier period of life render similar affections but of trifling moment.

In short, Dunglison believed that Jefferson’s complaint had mortal consequences because his body was too old to heal itself. “I much fear,” the doctor concluded, “that without some speedy amelioration my worst apprehensions must soon be realized.”¹⁹

Henry Lee’s doubts notwithstanding, Robley Dunglison had a meritorious future in store for him—all of it connected in some way to his original sponsor in America, Thomas Jefferson. Increasingly heralded for his medical writings, and known around Charlottesville as “the walking dictionary,” he would move to Philadelphia in the 1830s. There he would teach at the Jefferson Medical College, publish papers, and become one of the most productive members of the American Philosophical Society, which had been founded in 1743, the year of Jefferson’s birth, by Benjamin Franklin. Jefferson himself, America’s polymath after Franklin, was a member of the Society from 1780, and became its president concurrent with his vice presidency of the nation under John Adams. It is, perhaps, only fitting that the one grandson of Thomas Jefferson who chose medicine as his profession was the significantly named Benjamin Franklin Randolph.

From Franklin’s day to Dunglison’s, much of what the Philosophical Society did was to chart progress in the medical arts and in pure and applied science—very much in the spirit of Jefferson. Henry Lee, on the other hand, would end up attacking Jefferson in the fiercest terms, and go down in history as a ne’er do well with a poison pen. Whatever he saw among Jefferson’s private papers had only a short-term effect. He completed the second edition of his father’s Memoirs in 1827. But after Jeff Randolph published his grandfather’s collected letters in four volumes in 1829, among which was a critical account of “Light-Horse Harry” Lee from the 1790s, intellect yielded to emotion; the son ceased feeling that Jefferson deserved soft treatment. Lee’s next book was a ferocious diatribe that extended well beyond what his father wrote from debtor’s prison: James Madison would call the 1831 Observations on the Writings of Thomas Jefferson “a vial of rage.” A dying Jefferson had won Lee over, but only briefly.²⁰

We know the kind of dreams laudanum produced. From the testimony of the Romantic poets who swallowed laudanum recreationally, we are told that an initial euphoria often led to displeasure upon awakening from stupor. Percy Bysshe Shelley consumed laudanum for his nervous headaches. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who took it in widely varying doses, said that he suffered “horrors” and “degradation” from overuse of the drug. Edgar Allan Poe, in 1826 a student at the University of Virginia, reached out for laudanum in his later years to mitigate his private pain, and ended up a wasted talent.

Though an aid to the imagination, the opiate damaged judgment. Dreams are typically distortions, taking the substance of our lives and making it halfknowable. Reconstructed sense impressions take advantage of the mind’s temporarily lax control. These reveries can draw forth hidden sorrows or force the individual to revisit old anxieties. In other words, dreams isolate the individual. That is what appears to have been happening to the dying Thomas Jefferson on July 3, as he revisited a momentous time in his public life: “Warn the Committee to be on the alert!”

Perhaps he brought to his chemically bent mind dramatic players, such as his best friend from college days, John Page, a leader of the Committee of Safety, and later a U.S. congressman. Page had written to Jefferson in Philadelphia in April 1776, pleading for the Continental Congress to declare the colonies independent. Jefferson, of course, did all he could to oblige him. A loyal Republican throughout his career, Page died in 1808, at the end of Jefferson’s second term as president, after complaining about his financial woes. He punctuated his last letter with the words, “God bless you! then my dear Friend, for your Consolation. As to Death, I have long been prepared to meet it.” Jefferson, at eighty-three, was as accepting of death as Page had been when they were sixty-five.²²

The story of his unconscious murmurings about the Committee of Safety sounds so perfectly dramatic that it ought to be one of those meaningless myths that make up the founders’ storied lives. But this anecdote, amid the fog of Jefferson’s final days, was not one of those cooked up for later generations. “He remarked,” Jefferson Randolph carefully recalled, “that the curtains of his bed had been purchased from the first cargo that arrived after the peace of 1782,” that is, after American independence had been won and trade with England revived.

Jefferson’s nostalgia for the Revolution was nostalgia for a fast diminishing sense of authenticity in American life. The unselfish Revolutionary spirit had always been real to him. From his perspective, the original thirteen states had made a genuine effort to draw closer together. In his retirement years, exhibiting the fatigue occasioned by their union, the fractious states were unsystematic at best in their attempt to remain together. Though the grandchild most like him lived comfortably in Boston in 1825–1826, Jefferson found himself exhibiting less patience with northerners’ supposed vanities and more with southern clannishness.

The failing founder ruminated on the condition of his country, but he focused foremost on his immediate surroundings. Even as his mind returned to thoughts of the Revolution whence his fame arose, his deepest concern lay with the future of his university. Nothing meant so much to him in his last days and years as that institution—fashioning the future meant even more than finding a Barlow or Johnson to write a “proper” history of political parties in America. In February 1826, Jefferson speculated that his friend of fifty years, former president James Madison, would step in and succeed him as its rector. In June he was counting on it. Only then would he rest easy.²³

In harking back to the Revolution, Jefferson was in good company. Preparations were underway in every part of the Union to mark the first half-century of independence. As citizens paused to celebrate, the remembered Revolution enabled them to take a short respite from sectional politics. It had been years already since the second generation of leaders had taken over the demanding job of self-government from the Revolutionary generation; on July 4, 1826, they read the Declaration aloud in town after town, and fielded orators who reminisced about the “sacred cause,” and pledged that Americans would act in such a way as to become a more “wise and liberal” people. They echoed Jefferson’s words when they called 1776 a “consummation.”²⁴

Jefferson would see the Fourth, but he would not rise from his bed that day. On July 3, reclaiming images of an unforgettable past, he endured an arduous night of sleep, and prepared for the end. How telling that in his furious, opiuminspired acting out, he was moving his hand in the air, imagining himself writing—he was still doing all he could do to preserve the republic from harm. Though his troubled thoughts were illusory, they inform us, quite preciously, of what was running through his mind as he drifted away. He was still writing history—his own history—because it had not been done in his lifetime, at least not to his satisfaction.

As his consciousness faded, Jefferson was more than once roused to inquire whether it was yet midnight, and the Fourth of July. Dr. Dunglison heard him ask at 7:00 P.M. on July 3, and replied, “It soon will be”; to Nicholas Trist he repeated the question sometime later, and Trist answered falsely in the affirmative, out of sympathy, in the hope that he would rest easier. This was not, however, the last Jefferson spoke. He called out around 4:00 A.M. in “a strong and clear voice” to his servants (unnamed, but presumably including Burwell Colbert), words that were never recorded. Around 10:00 A.M. on the Fourth, Burwell interpreted a sign, and elevated his head against the pillow. Jefferson never spoke after that, his breathing faint until all stopped at fifty minutes past noon. His grandson closed his eyes.²⁶

Jefferson’s stout Revolutionary colleague John Adams was in his ninety-first year, alert, though immobile and nearly blind, when he rose on the fiftieth Fourth of July. In the correspondence of their retirement years, the two former presidents habitually related their individual ills along with their philosophy. They tended to do so self-deprecatingly, and always good-naturedly.

“Too fat to last much longer,” old Adams closed one letter to Jefferson in November 1823. Some months before, two days before his eightieth birthday, Jefferson previewed their common end when he finished one long letter with the words: “I join you cordially, and await [God’s] time and will with more readiness than reluctance. May we meet there again, in Congress, with our antient Colleagues, and recieve with them the seal of approbation ‘Well done, good and faithful servants.’”²⁷

The Virginian’s name was on Adams’s lips in the early afternoon of July 4, 1826. Presumably it was a recognition of some kind that they were both seeing in the national anniversary. We will never know for sure what old Adams was thinking. That morning, he had uttered a clear and valid sentiment for the benefit of the people in his hometown of Quincy, Massachusetts: “Independence forever!” Though his garbled mention of Jefferson’s name that afternoon has gone down in history as the polished and desirable “Jefferson survives,” these are famous last words that Adams almost certainly did not speak. “Jefferson survives” has provided a snug ending for a good many books, but close investigation reveals that the one individual known to have been present in the room where Adams lay scrupulously maintained that his last words—something or other with respect to Jefferson—were “indistinctly uttered.”²⁸

Until then, John Adams’s utterances were anything but indistinct. In 1813, in one of the letters he wrote to Jefferson discussing the doctrine of Theognis, the New Englander self-mockingly alluded to a recently published critique of a work he had written in younger years, when bright and ambitious. Feigning shock that anyone would still care about his political philosophy, or his past achievements at all, the oft-disparaged second president told the oft-heralded third president: “I am to become a great Man in my expiring moments.”

Of course, he meant “expiring moments” to be understood as 1813, for he already felt washed up and could not conceive that he still had thirteen years of life ahead of him. “Theognis and Plato, and ... Jefferson and I, must go down to Posterity together,” he had added, “and I know not, upon the whole, where to wish for better company.” Thanks to his wonderfully sardonic pen, the creative eulogists of 1826, and the numerous patriots and popular biographers who copied them, Adams and Jefferson have remained fairly inseparable in the historical imagination, where they both survive.²⁹

So they died just four hours apart. Their “double apotheosis” was hailed as a miraculous event, a providential sign. When word of the two statesmen’s deaths reached New York, a newspaper pronounced the coincidence “marvelous and enviable... It cannot be all chance.” The orator Daniel Webster called out: “The great epic of their lives, how happily concluded!” In Fayetteville, North Carolina, another tribute-bearing speaker focused on the force of their intellects, proclaiming that, “to their last moments,” these two national benefactors had retained minds that were, if “dethroned of the fancy and coruscations [flashes] of youth,” still “active and sound.” Their retirement years’ letters were “like cities set on a hill, which could not be hid—and the American people were in the habit of looking up to them as the living epistles of practical liberty, to be read of all men.” U.S. Attorney General William Wirt, who a few months earlier had turned Jefferson down when offered the position of president of the University of Virginia, extolled: “Is there a being, of heart so obdurate and skeptical, as not to feel the hand and hear the voice of Heaven in this wonderful dispensation?”³⁰

As the Revolutionary generation passed on, its grown children watched, and wept. Writers such as Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, Lydia Maria Child, and Catharine Maria Sedgwick penned historical novels that featured tragic friendships, deathbed scenes, and graveside meditations. Reassembling the building blocks of the American republic, these authors represented the population of the North American continent as a blend of cultures, immersed in a common, passionate quest for freedom. So in a very real sense, Romantic America was born as Thomas Jefferson was dying.

Among the second generation, and the one that followed it and led the nation into its Civil War, the double apotheosis was hard to ignore. On July 4, 1863, the momentous Battle of Gettysburg concluded. Taken by the news, President Lincoln addressed a crowd of expectant citizens who stood before the White House. Thinking back to his own youth, and to the events of July 4, 1826, he acknowledged the many “peculiar recognitions” that the Fourth of July evoked: “Precisely fifty years after they put their hands to the paper it pleased Almighty God to take both from the stage of action,” he said of Adams and Jefferson. “This was indeed an extraordinary and remarkable event in our history.”³¹

So how ought we to encounter the Adams-Jefferson double apotheosis today? We cannot make everything make perfect sense, as the Romantics tried to do. Ambiguity persists along with the finitude of the body and the limits on freedom. People manipulate history to ward off despair. Even science cannot help but mythologize nature to some degree. Though Adams’s “Jefferson survives” is contrived in one respect, this does not make the double apotheosis a simple coincidence, or an event entirely beyond reason. There are millions who have seen and heard reports of near-death experiences in which patients who have died on the operating table perceive a “beyond” before being resuscitated. Every generation produces stories that blur the boundary between temporality and eternity.

Doctors have recently taken note of the uncanny ability of dying patients to select a meaningful moment for death, especially anniversaries that bear personal significance. In this sense, the double apotheosis was not unique. A British study has tried to balance biological, psychological, and social factors in the dying process. Examining “disease trajectories,” clinical researchers describe some outstanding examples in which death was postponed or hastened by the dying. One such episode even concerns a fiftieth anniversary.

Here are some of the study’s findings:

1. An often agitated Catholic veteran of the Far East theater in World War II, who knew he was dying, played out a personal drama and confessed to a priest that he had participated in war atrocities. After receiving absolution, the veteran rested more easily, physically suffered less, and quietly awaited the fiftieth anniversary of VJ (Victory over Japan) Day. He died directly after seeing the anniversary commemorated on the television.

2. A young AIDS patient facing the onset of dementia fell into a coma and was expected to die in a few days. Comatose, he held on for three weeks; and although all cognitive capacity had abandoned him, he remained somehow aware of the approaching twentieth anniversary of his mother’s death. They had been very close, the patient’s surviving relatives explained knowingly, and so no one was surprised when he finally died on that day of personal significance.

3. A man, married sixty years, had just endured the death of his wife, only to collapse and die as her funeral was coming to an end. He had never been ill a day in his life, and presumably chose to die when life lost its greatest meaning.³²

As for Adams and Jefferson, two exceptionally strong-willed individuals, it is not hard to imagine that the pathological cause of death was present for some time prior, and that the individual will somehow directed the final act. Thomas Jefferson’s poignant (and verifiable) question on the night of July 3—“Is it the Fourth?” he pressed Dr. Dunglison, in what the doctor termed a “husky” voice—opens up the possibility that thoughts of anticipation triggered neurochemical changes. Or, perhaps, to put it in terms Jefferson understood, a “sympathy” acted on behalf of bodily and spiritual balance, connecting the simple fact of a date with his sense of the world. A decade before, he had complimented the forward-looking script of a Fourth of July orator: “I hope the example will be followed and make the 4th of July a revision of conduct and of recall to the principles which made it our birth-day.”³³ In Jefferson’s mind, the very idea of the Fourth of July remained a formative and transformative moment.

We should be allowed to return to the primacy of sensible nerves—of the “feeling” underlying the way of life and death in Jefferson’s generation. As Théophile de Bordeu put it in his Research on the History of Medicine (1767), “Feeling is involved in all the functions [of the body]; it directs them all. It dominates over illnesses; it guides the action of remedies; it sometimes becomes so dependent upon the soul, that the soul’s passions take the upper hand over all the changes of the body.”³⁴ After all is said and done, eighteenth-century philosophical medicine explains what happened quite as satisfyingly as the latest studies. The “soul’s passions” had animated Thomas Jefferson’s activist mind for eighty-three years. Why should they not have directed his final moments as well?

Martha Jefferson Randolph was reared by her father to be mentally strong. No doubt she watched as her son-in-law Nicholas Trist snipped off tufts of the deceased Thomas Jefferson’s still reddish hair, as a souvenir for family members, before the body was prepared for burial.³⁶

No one set forth details of the July 5 burial ceremony at the Monticello cemetery other than to take note of the weather, an intermittent rain. The Reverend Hatch conducted the service. The obelisk Jefferson had designed for his own tomb would be carved out of granite by workers at the university during the next days and weeks.

Martha sought to cope with this momentous death by collecting newspaper clippings and poems of lament published in her father’s honor. One moved her so much that she wrote it down at the back of Jefferson’s precious Commonplace Book, the loose pages of which she had saved and would pass down to Virginia and Nicholas Trist. The poem, by a favorite contemporary, Anna Letitia Barbauld, was nine stanzas in length and opened with the following:

Pure spirit! O where art thou now!
Oh whisper to my soul!
O let some soothing thought of thee,
This bitter grief control
’Tis not for thee these tears I shed
Thy sufferings now are o’er;
The sea is calm, the tempest past,
On that eternal shore.³⁷

This was, whether consciously intended or not, an answer to the deathbed adieu her father had left her, the poem reproduced at the opening of this book. All pain and grief behind, Thomas Jefferson had reached the “eternal shore” that, as he put it, “crowns all my hopes, or which buries my cares.” By every indication, he saw death as peace. He accepted it easily, because it took so many so swiftly, and took most at a far younger age. In his life, and especially in his retirement, he had only feared uselessness and incapacity.

Cornelia Randolph was visiting her sister Ellen in Boston in June, and so these two grown granddaughters were unable to attend the funeral. They had received word from home that their grandfather was sinking and that they might see him one last time if they hurried. But they had gone no farther than New York when word of his death on the Fourth reached them. Ellen described what it was like to see Monticello under these new circumstances:

He was gone. His place was empty. I visited his grave, but the whole house at Monticello, with its large apartments and lofty ceilings, appeared to me one vast monument. Yet I could not always feel that I should see him no more. I wandered the vacant rooms as if I were looking for him.

As she tarried in his bedroom, she reckoned that the best years of her life had been spent here, in his company. She stared at the chair she could ordinarily be expected to find him occupying. She gazed at his clothing—nothing had as yet been moved. Then she took small souvenirs from his writing table, including scraps of paper with his handwriting on them.

All seemed as if he had just quitted the rooms and there were moments when I felt as if I expected his return. For days I started at what seemed the sound of his step or his voice, and caught myself listening for both.

In seeking to create a “new man,” he was in effect (ironically, then) employing a religious model—conversion—as he reached out with a broad plan of mass self-improvement. His aim was to aid in reconstituting the physical and moral health of those around him—an imperiled generation, as he saw it. Keeping the “Revolution of 1800” alive, Jefferson’s ostensibly learned successors would avoid descent into a state of torpor (as manifest in impressionable “nervous persons” with “languid fibres”); clear-eyed, they would see beyond the façade of proclaimed piety that masked intolerance; they would possess strength enough to prevent reemergence of the cruel consensus that had stood behind a grasping, encroaching, elite-driven political power. Jeffersonian democracy derived from a prophetic, questioning mind, and a sensitive, self-monitored body.

This book has asked readers to adjust their overall view and regard Thomas Jefferson as one with an all-embracing medical curiosity, that is, to see him as an inquiring physiologist.⁴⁰ As such, he does not dwell on abstractions, the way some who doubted his capacity to rule once clamored. Nor is he necessarily timid about sex. What makes the man so long symbolized in the metonym of Head and Heart somewhat altered now is that Body communicates to us, too—and not merely in the form of rhetoric Jefferson used, knowing that his constituency understood it. In their changing world of physical sensations, agony and strife, Body displaced religiosity to a marked degree. More and more, from the days of Dr. Tissot forward, the intellect was recognized as having a dependence on the material body for promoting human vitality (and, ultimately, democracy). Or as Antonio Damasio has more recently put it, “Emotions play out in the theater of the body.”⁴¹

Why, then, has it taken so long to identify this “other” Jefferson? It is because he did not communicate that physicality, that sensationalism, without a good bit of invention and disguise, just as we have shown that he hid a distinct unease with regard to his political legacy by projecting his own anxiety onto the people at large. What Jefferson hid, he hid in the hope that it would afford him peace.

Throughout his life, and in retirement especially, Jefferson came to understand that private repose and contentment could not be had but through discretion in speaking and writing. Beyond sponsorship of the new university, he did not wish to be immersed in public debate anymore. He did his best to restrain himself. He wrote, begging not to be quoted. He relied on his friends to fulfill his public objectives, but not in his name.

Now we must finally place this sentient, striving Jefferson beside the one so long familiar—the inspiring lover of liberty. For generations, he has been chiefly associated in the popular mind with lofty thoughts and memorable phrases. Of late, we find him presented as a canny political animal, which, of course, he was, too. Recently, the historian Joyce Appleby wrote trenchantly of his mixed legacy, as the slave owner who was a force for liberation: “That Jefferson carries the odium of slavery for his generation is a wry tribute to his status as the voice of America’s better self.”⁴² The voice of America’s better self. His disgust for artificial distinctions within society, his impatience with those who swallowed prescriptive texts without questioning—his dissidence was real. To rebuke him without acknowledging his willingness to stand public trial for his beliefs is to underestimate him. Appleby found in Jefferson an “introspective honesty” not matched by many others among the founders, in spite of his clear capacity to rationalize. I find this a daring, and marvelously provocative, statement.

At the end of his days, Jefferson retained his lifelong ability to use words to public advantage. The last message he consciously directed to his country recapped so many that had preceded: On June 24, 1826, he replied to the Washington, D.C., committee that had optimistically invited the eighty-three-year-old to attend their Fourth of July jubilee celebration. Blasting “monkish ignorance and superstition,” as he had many times during his public life, Jefferson harkened back to the trials of the Revolution, warmly upholding “the blessings and security of self-government,” and reiterating his “undiminished devotion” to human liberty.⁴³ Then he put his pen down, and without fear or regret got on with the process of dying.

The view provided here, of Jefferson as an old man looking back on life, is a rather more personal perspective than that which most historians have taken in appraising Jefferson’s position among the founders. But I believe such a focus has been needed. Although Jefferson’s words and values remain critical elements in Americans’ overall sense of what makes this nation distinctive, the slow, building crescendo of Jefferson’s already animated life story had not really been heard. His remarkable retirement years were of insufficient consequence to Jefferson studies, and I wanted to fill in some of what was missing.

But my goal has been larger than that. I set out to convey the imagination of an eighteenth-century man who read incessantly but safeguarded his inmost thoughts, who wrote letters every day but revealed something less than what the recipients of his letters (let alone we) would have liked. I have done my best to capitalize on clues. I have sought out every word he wrote that offers us some hint about his own sense of what he lived for. I will conclude my version of his life, then, with one final bit of Jeffersonian speculation on how the world would be after he was gone.

For help, I call upon the London-born novelist E. M. Forster, who lived for a time in Greece. When we think of a lifetime as a story, it is worth remembering one of Forster’s observations. Reckoning birth as an experience that is forgotten, and death as an experience much anticipated but beyond comprehension, the novelist wrote simply: “Our final experience, like our first, is conjectural. We move between two darknesses.”⁴⁴ That would seem, at first glance, a statement that the eighteenth-century man of science could live with.

But is it complete? Shortly before her own death, Abigail Adams received a pert letter from Thomas Jefferson in which he lightly meditated on the end of life and the beginning of the imagined next: “I heard once a very old friend,” he narrated, “who had troubled himself with neither poets nor philosophers, say ... in plain prose, that he was tired of pulling off his shoes and stockings at night, and putting them on again in the morning. The wish to stay here is thus gradually extinguished: but not so easily that of returning once in a while to see how things have gone on. Perhaps however one of the elements of future felicity is to be a constant and unimpassioned view of what is passing here.”⁴⁵ So much for darknesses. I suggest it was not for mere literary effect that Jefferson wrote these words. He quested for light, and hoped to “see” what befell his country next.

That would be his “future felicity.” Anyway, it was as close to divining as Thomas Jefferson got. He offers a generous quantity of bright sentiments for a man habitually accused of hiding himself. What makes him most unusual among historical figures is that so much of what he said and did over the long course of his life remains vivid. Jefferson dying did not spend his solitude speculating on darknesses. He appears to have foreseen that his would not be a voice in the dark, but one that would continue speaking to history, in encouraging tones, after his lifetime was spent.

Americans have a habit of focusing attention back while thinking of the present, looking to the founding era with the hope that it will shed light on the nation’s democratic promise (or on its dim deficiencies). Few would dispute that this is a fruitful exercise, though it is always an uncertain one. To borrow Forster’s imagery again, America’s past is a darkness into which we can send back our brightest flares and even then hope to see only unequal pieces of a still life; whereas America’s future is another darkness into which we can but imaginatively project a light that only flickers.

Thomas Jefferson possessed no better tools: We were the darkness to his flickering light. He looked backward and thought he could perceive the barbarity (“the throes and convulsions of the ancient world”) that had preceded. In response, he sought to represent what was better: a civilizing, liberalizing spirit. He rejected traditional definitions of morality and modes of faith (submission), which he regarded as intellectual cowardice; and in its place he pursued selfknowledge (release), which he regarded as a republican trait. He wrote with intensity and application, and argued for responsible self-government—for eventual healing and balance.

Jefferson was more brazen than most Americans realize. Though it was often remarked upon that he was an indulgent host and an amiable acquaintance, he devoted little time to guesswork and pleasantries. He was purposeful in his dealings with others, as hardy and potent and nervy as one could be who abhorred all violence. He probably gave more attention to body than to soul. He dwelled relentlessly on knowable experiences, on carnal life, on doing.

He was a cool-seeming man with thoughts of fire, a force for the freedom of mind essential to a democracy. He was, just as deservedly, the father of black disillusionment; for he excluded African Americans from his republic of felicity. Yes, he respected the humanity of those whom he owned. Yes, he subscribed to what was then a common belief in a racial hierarchy. To single him out, we might just as well single out James Madison, no less distinguished a political figure (if less emotive in the minds of modern Americans). But we know Thomas Jefferson as a humanist, a man who detested apathy. And still he did not evaluate any more humane alternative to slavery than the one he presented just after the Revolution: mass deportation. He chose not to reconsider. He chose not to lead. He chose not to emancipate his mind.

I opened these pages with a passage from Edward Young, a favorite poet of Thomas Jefferson’s. Let me close with lines from Young as well. Writing that human beings illogically sought and shunned death with equal resolve, the poet wished that they would spend less of life absorbed in vain pursuits and instead see Time for what it is.

However Jefferson is to be judged by our time, I hope that more has been revealed in these pages of his living sensations than of his near dying sensations. With warm attachment, he built a majestic house that extended science and art, and a university that extended his mind. And that is where and how he tested, as an Epicurean, for the palpable feeling of tranquil permanent felicity.

Opium

July 1: The Arrival of Henry Lee

July 3: “Warn the Committee”

July 4: Peculiar Recognitions

“I Can Never Love Again”

Between Two Darknesses