Jefferson's Secrets

The poet’s point is simple: To fear death is to resist life and misinterpret nature. Jefferson copied Young’s lines into his Commonplace Book, a scrapbook of quotations, sometime in the late 1760s or early 1770s; this was about the time he met his wife and moved to the mountaintop where he had already begun the brightly conceived mansion of Monticello. He built, experimented, redesigned, and brought new life to that reputable prominence, occasionally having to bury friends and loved ones in its shade.

No stranger to sorrow, an elderly Thomas Jefferson was still quoting Young’s verses a half-century later. In a letter he wrote to John Adams from Monticello in 1822, he lamented the worn and weary feeling of old age. Every act felt to him like a pointless repetition, wherein “with lab’ring step / To tread our former footsteps.”² He had been granted long life. His eighty-three years made him, in 1826, one of the last three surviving signers (among the original fifty-six) of the Declaration of Independence. He would tread heavily in former footsteps, as the poet put it, until July 4 of that year. The day Jefferson died was America’s fiftieth Fourth of July, its jubilee as a nation.

He was a zealot, supremely self-confident, extremely well read, a visionary proponent of natural rights, and the moving spirit behind America’s first opposition political party, the Democratic-Republican, which challenged upper-class rule. Born April 13, 1743, at Shadwell, on the Virginia frontier and directly below Monticello, he was thirty-three when he wrote the Declaration of Independence; forty-one when he journeyed to France to take Benjamin Franklin’s place as America’s minister to the Court of Versailles; forty-seven when he joined George Washington’s cabinet as the first secretary of state; and fifty-seven when he took the oath of office as president. As he built his national reputation, he impressed upon the citizens of America an unassailable ideal that we take for granted in the twenty-first century: participatory democracy.

This book addresses deep and delicate questions about a figure from our national past who looms so large in social memory that he is primarily evaluated on the basis of selective re-readings of familiar texts. My aim is somewhat different. Distrustful of smooth biographical narratives that question only so far, I am interested in the unfamiliar that was familiar to Jefferson. This study is built upon an appreciation for the particular spectrum of knowledge and feeling that characterized the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: an alien medical environment, sexual attitudes unlike our own, literary and aesthetic considerations, as well as the more obvious (and more prominent in modern minds) aspects of political competition and race relations. I want the reader to grasp, as fully as possible, what conditioned Thomas Jefferson’s mind.

Throughout his life, Jefferson used language in a distinctive manner. His consciousness of his audience has a lot to do with why, these many generations later, we continue to appreciate his democratic political genius and his lively, comforting expressions. But what if we are only scratching the surface of his meaning? DNA connecting his genetic material to that of the offspring of one of his slaves has recently suggested that key facets of his life remain poorly understood. His revolutionary romance with the written word is only one part of what binds us to him. For reasons having to do with the risks he took, both as a private man and as a public figure, everyone, it seems, wants to discover Jefferson’s secrets.

We start at death and move backward through his retirement, because that is how an emotive Jefferson is to be found, and how, consequently, we can add meaning to many of his earlier writings. In the lesser-known texts of his postpresidential years, he presents a retrospective few have ventured to study until now.³ He looks back on his long life in the decidedly sensual terms of enjoyment and suffering, ease and dis-ease. Most critically, I find, he invokes a comprehensive language of medicine past that historical investigators have tended to ignore. We have been shut off from that vocabulary, and it is one that will make Jefferson appear less secretive when we better understand it.

No label is all embracing. We must take care in describing Jefferson, because his tendencies vary: Like a poet, he cannot dismiss mortality when he writes of community. Like a philosopher, he is involved with systems of knowledge and morality; and least familiar of all, like a physiologist, he looks elementally at the body’s natural responses—pain and pleasure mechanisms, drives and motivations—and tries to comprehend how human beings can thrive in such a stormy, yet fertile, environment as the Earth we know. Politics is much the same for him: an environment both stormy and fertile. He constantly inquires about conditions. When, as a political leader, he draws upon his (and his society’s) deep concern with neurophysiological symptoms, he invariably describes psychological effects. Invoking the “agonizing spasms of infuriated man,” or the “agitations of the public mind,” “tickled nerves” or “frigid insensibility,” Jefferson manifestly lets us know how he is feeling about America’s prospects. This is an encompassing theme within the pages of Jefferson’s Secrets.

In attempting a closer examination of Jefferson’s mind, I am introducing two conspicuous methods of discovery: reading and interpreting the consciousness-raising, sympathy-generating language of eighteenth-century health science that he relied on so heavily; and, in a broader sense, emphasizing the relatively uncensored Jefferson that exists in the least-studied writings of his retirement years, 1809–1826. His large body of papers for the postpresidential period have been selectively reprinted; Jefferson left a treasure trove of unceremonious writings yet to be compared to those already published.

This book will not bring an end to all arguments about Jefferson, but it should help distance him from the mounting prejudices of modern biographers. I resuscitate Thomas Jefferson long enough to pose certain questions that he has answered subtly in the personal documents of his late years: What did this prodigious reader and ruminator take from books? What kind of America did he envision? How might we, from so great a cultural distance, be misjudging him? In short, what was the extent, and what were the limits, of his imagination? We have lost touch with Jefferson’s imagination, and that is a shame.

Of course, Jefferson cannot partake of our imaginations. On the high-priority, rather touchy subject of race, for instance, some read his sensitive words about human rights, which we take to define the democratic ethos, and conclude that Jefferson lost a good deal of sleep over slavery; others believe that, with cowardly abstention, he turned his back on black America—indeed, on all of us in the twenty-first century. We need to find a way to approach historical problems without allowing our own emotional baggage to overwhelm the discussion.

On the equally interesting, and related, subject of his sexual imagination, we need to consult at-home medical guides and the popular literature he and his family owned; we need to contend with unquestioned class privilege and the understood options men possessed, as well as the disjunction (common to all periods of history) between what people said and what they did. This is a complex subject that necessarily takes us beyond the limits of Jefferson’s Virginia surroundings, and yet it was as close to his heart as his reading and writing in Greek. What we might consider indelicate, or an unpersuasive logic, might have been entirely defensible when Jefferson lived.

The reader should approach this book with an open mind. Too often, the stubbornness that directs modern ideologies shuts off valuable discussion. I hope to launch a more honest conversation about Jefferson, race, and sex than historians and others have engaged in of late. When DNA testing in 1998 sexually linked “a Jefferson” to Jefferson’s slave Sally Hemings, two extreme opinions emerged: Either Jefferson and Hemings were in love in a way we should be able to recognize or a relative of Thomas Jefferson’s had slept with Hemings, because the president was morally above such behavior.

Good historical inquiry should never stop. That is what law professor Annette Gordon-Reed believed in challenging a consensus in 1997. In her dogged and timely analysis, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy, and unaware that a DNA “solution” was about to be attempted, she reopened the door to this discussion. Just because DNA appears to have made our task (“Did he or didn’t he?”) easier, we should not close the door now.

There is much we do not know about the Jefferson-Hemings relationship, and the last thing we should do is to impose twenty-first-century views of sex on eighteenth-century people so that their relationships “make sense.” First, the unusual emotional considerations facing a mixed-race couple in, say, the 1950s or 1990s, cannot be compared to those of Jefferson’s time and place. Second, there is no universal structure for human sexual response: We do not share in eighteenth-century sexual attitudes, and we should not guess at Jefferson’s or Hemings’s feelings according to modern notions of love and sex. It is silly to deny that sexuality has a history. Third, we should admit that part of what impels the popular imagination today is the desire to protect the historical reputation of Thomas Jefferson or to construct one for Sally Hemings—or both at once, by concluding that they were a “romantic” couple. As a slave, she had only a limited range of options; and all we know about her is what her son told a newspaper reporter decades after her death: He referred to her as Jefferson’s “concubine.” He made no allusion to affectionate feelings of any kind. Thus, the conversation begun by Gordon-Reed should continue.

In the pages that follow, Jefferson writes about politics, sex, race, and religion in ways that complement, but in significant ways alter, his better-known writings. The musings of his later years, Jefferson’s lost words, as it were, offer valuable insights into his inner life. I wish to suggest that our knowledge of him is incomplete if we fail to obtain a clearer picture of these years. We shall see how intensely conscious he was of his role in history, though he was retired from politics, and how fearful he was that his persistent political opposition would put its imprint on the age. And in exploring the medical vernacular, a metaphorically rich subset of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century writing, we shall see beyond the harried frame and physical aches and pains of an old man and discover, at the crossroads of politics and religion, what he experienced as the medical Enlightenment.

Jefferson was body as well as mind. In the texts he left behind, Body gestures to us no less than Head and Heart imaginatively “speak” to us. Body tells us about his appetites and desires, his fears of contamination. As quotable as Jefferson’s observations tend to be, his most memorable statements do not often place him inside a world of physicality. This is misleading, because physical nature did not simply amuse him; it preoccupied him. He was marked by an enthusiastic confidence in the existence of a scientific truth that he could apply to human society. The design of nature was a lifelong problem that loomed before him, and he thrived on the creativity scientific study invited.⁴

Through literature on the body, we also learn how flawed the eighteenth-century scientific construction of nature was. From our perspective, Jefferson’s ideas about sex and race suffer, of course, because his world saw gender differences and power as natural rather than cultural formulations. When he conceived, for example, that “all men are created equal,” as lovingly as these words are still received, Jefferson restricted equality to a minority of his countrymen, based on a “natural” hierarchy of race and gender. He also tended to group taste and temperament in natural rather than cultural categories—because that is what the science of his day preached.

To ask “What did life really mean to Jefferson and his generation?” is not ridiculous. The question can be broken down into its component parts, as we have already begun to do here.

Recent writing on Jefferson infers that his sensual side was most dominant during his political prime, and particularly when he served as American minister to France (1784–1789). But we must, with equal attention, plumb the depths of his later years’ reflections. Just to take one long-since published example, and one of the most comprehensively revealing letters of his retirement years, Jefferson answered John Adams’s request for his judgment on whether life was worth living over again. This exchange occurred in 1816, as the Virginian was nearing his seventy-third birthday, and Adams had just turned eighty. The two were, at this point, ten years from death.

“I cannot be serious!” Adams opened his appeal. “I am about to write You, the most frivolous letter, you ever read.” Jefferson obliged him fully, as he tended to do in these years, by using a curious kind of medical imagery to distinguish the dull protestations of others from his own determination and sturdy optimism. Here, then, is Jefferson to Adams:

I think with you that it is a good world on the whole, that it has been framed on a principle of benevolence, and more pleasure than pain has been dealt out to us. There are indeed (who might say Nay) gloomy and hypocondriac minds, inhabitants of diseased bodies, disgusted with the present, and despairing of the future; always counting on the worst to happen. To these I say How much pain have cost us the evils which have never happened?⁵

There is more here than meets the eye. Jefferson was claiming an almost prophetic moralizing power; he did so on the basis of his particular concern with bodies, healthy and diseased.

We see, too, that he attributed pain and pessimism to an abnormal psychology. He was realist enough to know that physical deterioration belongs to the processes of nature, but it did not follow for him that the soul ought to wallow in anxious anticipation of what might occur. Mind and body worked in tandem: those of “gloomy and hypocondriac minds” were “inhabitants of diseased bodies.” And what is he telling us about the imagination? In Jefferson’s day, hypocondriac was defined as “disordered in the imagination”;⁶ he knew the healthy imagination to be productive of clever designs, whereas the sickly or disordered imagination laid waste to all pleasing potential. Happiness can just as easily be said to derive from the life of the body as the mind.

Jefferson’s reply to Adams proceeded:

My temperament is sanguine. I steer my bark with Hope in the head, leaving Fear astern. My hopes indeed sometimes fail; but not oftener than the forebodings of the gloomy. There are, I acknoledge, even in the happiest life, some terrible convulsions, heavy set-offs against the opposite page of the account. I have often wondered for what good end the sensations of Grief could be intended. All our other passions, within proper bounds, have an useful object.

Here the optimist consults the pathologist, and defines the nearly unendurable pains of life in decisive terms of physicality, as “convulsions” and “sensations of Grief,” emerging from a cluster of indescribable, unfathomable “passions.” Harassments, some visceral and devastating, may loom; yet in Jefferson’s vocabulary, life is made tolerable (and worth repeating, if such were possible) through a deliberate pursuit of—as he goes on to tell Adams—“a just equilibrium of all the passions.”

Throughout his adult years, Jefferson consistently invoked a desire to live in a state of tranquil ease—“tranquil permanent felicity”—that flowed from a sweet, thriving home life. Indeed, in the most personal sense, this is what Jefferson meant by “pursuit of happiness.” He used the word felicity consistently and often when he described a situation greatly desired, or an ideal or near-perfect value; delight sometimes substituted for felicity. The word happiness was a more generic and less impassioned version of the same quality.⁷

Under the circumstances of a self-monitored life, death is neither a shock nor a terror, certainly not to one who has studied the human condition as Jefferson had. There was no surprise in the downward slope of his last years. Yet even from an aging man’s perspective, sensations—the imaginative faculties—were to be enlisted in the enjoyment of life.

Because we shall be going into greater depth when we examine Jefferson’s recurrence to a neurological vocabulary, it helps, right from the beginning, to associate the quality of life Jefferson so famously prescribed with the perspective of a distinguished modern neurologist who has devoted books to capturing “the feeling brain,” or how feeling becomes known to the feeling organism.

Antonio Damasio examines what happens inside the sensory portals (delivery of our sight, sound, taste, touch, olfaction) and nerve pathways, tracking automatic emotional responses and individualized feelings, separating nature’s self from culture’s self. He takes feeling back to its essential electrochemistry by traversing a “body landscape.”

“Emotion-induction sites,” he writes, “trigger a number of responses toward the body and toward other brain sites, and unleash the full range of body and brain responses that constitute emotion.” Thus emotion precedes feeling. Feelings emerge as changes take place in the body’s chemical profile, when muscles in the face, throat, trunk, and limbs contract. First we execute emotions, and then we know what we are feeling.

As an experiment, Dr. Damasio asks us to reconstruct through mental imagery what good feelings feel like. He has the subject conjure a warming sun and a breezy siesta at the oceanside. As he describes the physiology of being at ease, he points to less tangible, more diffuse sensations: “You had the energy to move, but somehow you preferred to remain quiet, a paradoxical combination of the ability and inclination to act and the savoring of the stillness.... The picture of events you eagerly anticipated as pleasurable came into mind, as did scenes you enjoyed experiencing in the past. Also, you found that your cast of mind was, well, felicitous.”

Felicitous stillness, then, is Damasio’s novel definition for inner peace and contentment. Backed by the latest neuroscience, the twenty-first-century doctor, by apparent accident, chooses almost the same words Jefferson chose as he elaborates on the Jeffersonian ideal of “tranquil permanent felicity.” So, just as there are universally recognizable facial expressions for fear, anger, surprise, sadness, and happiness, there are historically dynamic, if not quite transcendent, ways of comparing vocabularies of emotion and feeling.

As Damasio shows, too, in everything we encounter there is a dynamic engagement of the body. Illustrating the interactive perceptions that we know as good feelings and that Jefferson enlarged into a tranquil, permanent, felicitous lifestyle, the neurologist returns to our imagined moment on the beach: “What you usually regard as ‘body’ and ‘mind’ blended in harmony. Any conflicts now seem abated.” For Jefferson and eighteenth-century neuroscience, this phenomenon was “a just equilibrium of all the passions.”

The mind perceives the body’s well-balanced operation. The mind tells us that the flesh is happy. All feeling is, in Damasio’s words, “the idea of the body being in a certain way.” He is still essentially speaking Jefferson’s language, for both are attuned to reactive processes, combining “well-being” and “well-thinking.”⁸

In an earlier book, The Inner Jefferson (1995), I described my subject as a “grieving optimist”—and the paradox was intentional. Fully sixty of Jefferson’s Commonplace Book entries concerned death in one way or another. Because he relished the sensations that rendered human beings capable of unselfish commitment to one another, he relished (or should we say withstood) “the joy of grief” that encompassed the poetry of his age. At the same time, he evidenced the most forward-looking perspective among the founders, confident in the educability of an expanding electorate.⁹ His reply to Adams’s “frivolous” question suggests that he considered death surmountable, though obviously not avoidable, through the power of positive thinking. In this sense, as we can glean from the poem of Edward Young that meant so much to him, Thomas Jefferson held a conception of mortality that was rather unsuperstitious.

In part because he worshipped science and nature, Jefferson never alluded to death with anything but studied calm. As he aged, he professed that he was entirely prepared for a peaceable death whenever it might come, and that life’s end did not have to be anything more than the body’s exhaustion. Trusting in nature, he gave the passion and mental toil of his last years to the construction of the University of Virginia, in his own neighborhood. He lived to see it open in 1825, and was greeted with near awe whenever he descended from his mountaintop and paid the school a visit.

He first thought that his retirement from the public had come at the end of 1793 when, at the age of fifty, he had completed his tenure as secretary of state and quit George Washington’s administration. In “a retirement I doat on,” he had fashioned himself “an Antediluvian patriarch among my children & grandchildren.” ¹⁰ To James Madison, in the spring of 1795, he explained why he could not be persuaded to return to politics: “My health is entirely broken down within the last eight months; my age requires that I should place my affairs in a clear state.... The little spice of ambition, which I had in my younger days, has long since evaporated, and I set less store by a posthumous than present name.”¹¹ By 1796, however, he was persuaded to stand for president against his friend Adams, after their political paths had diverged. He narrowly lost, and according to the original constitutional provision, as the second-place vote-getter, Jefferson became vice president.

Politics became nastier, intensifying Jefferson’s fear that America’s republican experiment would dissolve in the face of a consolidating power at the center. In notes he recorded after a dinner conversation with President Adams, he wrote, somewhat incredulously, that the second president feared democracy: “As to trusting to a popular assembly for the preserv[atio]n of our liberties it was [to Adams] the merest chimaera imaginable.” Adams underscored “that anarchy did more mischief in one night than tyranny in an age.”¹² In 1800, Jefferson succeeded in unseating the incumbent. After serving two terms at the head of the nation, presiding over what he considered a restoration of the Revolutionary turn of mind, he retired for good in 1809, when he was about to turn sixty-six.

In old age, Jefferson extracted more from life than most do in a lifetime. Though his physical complaints were certainly real and pronounced, when he died, he died possessing more felicitous thoughts than solemn regrets. Still, the thoughts he expressed were bittersweet. Nearly every day, he passed the graveyard where he had buried a best friend and brother-in-law before the Revolution; a wife not long after; a grown daughter during his presidency; and a granddaughter, who had delivered great-grandchildren, in the late winter of 1826, just before his own final illness. It is but a short, sloping walk from Monticello’s west portico to the burial ground where the bones of Thomas Jefferson reside. Those who wish to feel closer to history can still make that walk.

A mindful practitioner of the art of living life, Jefferson was every bit as diligent when he scripted his own death. The author of the “Declaration of American Independence”—as the words on his tombstone actually read—left little to chance. During his last months, as he assiduously mapped out the future of the newly established university, he took stock of the contents of his wine cellar; gave his “annual gratuity” of twenty dollars each to his favorite slaves, Burwell Colbert (coordinator of Monticello domestic affairs) and John Hemings (carpenter); and paid his outstanding bills to cover the requirements of daily existence, such as newspapers and bookbinding and repair of his prized “polygraph,” the mechanical device that enabled him to produce instantaneous copies of outgoing letters.¹³ He made sure that his private papers were perfectly filed and readily accessible to his thirty-three-year-old grandson and executor, Thomas Jefferson Randolph. He knew how he wanted to embark on his voyage into historical memory.

Jefferson died worn down in body but as vigorous intellectually as he was in his prime. He devoted his life to reading, designing, and communicating. The politically uncompromising and distinctly sentimental third president of the United States applied his phenomenal will to every project he undertook. That included the active enterprise of surviving until July 4, 1826. Lanky and lean, and troubled by various internal complaints, he was frail at eighty-three years, two months, and twenty-one days old, when his nation celebrated its fifty-year jubilee. His death is doubly memorable because the ninety-year-old John Adams “chose” that same day to die, outlasting the Virginian by some four hours.

For quite a while, Jefferson had been telling his correspondents that the effects of age were upon him. An old wrist injury made writing extraordinarily difficult, as his friend William Short well knew, for he had been Jefferson’s private secretary in France in 1786 when the hand was fractured and poorly set. “I see with some kind of alarm the life which you condemn yourself to lead,” Short wrote in 1819. “So much time passed at the writing desk must be unfavorable to health—& I really wish you would consult more your health & less the satisfaction of your correspondents.”¹⁴ “My race is run,” Jefferson wrote in 1822 to the Marquis de Lafayette. “Weighed down with years, I am still more disabled from writing by a wrist & fingers almost without joints. This has obliged me to withdraw from all correspondence that is not indispensable.”¹⁵ That same year, in the somewhat more playful style of address he reserved for women, he philosophized: “Time, which wears on all things, does not spare the energies either of body or mind of a presque [near] Octogenaire. While I could, I did what I could, and now acquiesce chearfully in the law of nature which, by unfitting us for action, warns us to retire.”¹⁶

Yet his pen remained active, his grip firm and hand steady, his penmanship as clear and unmistakable as ever before, right up to the third week of June 1826, when he became permanently bedridden. He could have dictated letters to his daughter or one of the grown grandchildren who lived with him; but he did so rarely, insisting for the most part on managing everything as he always had, maintaining his daily account books and his Summary Journal of Letters, in which he made notations about every letter sent and received. By the end of his life, that annotated manuscript extended to several hundred pages.¹⁷

Despite “paroxysms” of pain, to use his and his doctor’s words, the celebrated draftsman pressed on. Integrally concerned with the university he had founded, the layout of which he had personally overseen, he remained attentive and ready to act. At the same time, understandably nostalgic for the Revolution, reluctant to voice publicly that he considered some of its principles in danger of dilution, he deftly prepared the final drafts of what he hoped would be politically definitive letters to friends, the last gifts of his still-agile mind. He did not give in until he was ready.

He died, in his own bed, at 12:50 P.M. on that fiftieth Fourth of July. His keen interest in the affairs of the university at the end of his days did not prove such a distraction that he enjoyed any less the company of the family that surrounded him. On July 2, he informed “the cherished companion of my early life, and nurse of my age,” his one surviving daughter, Martha Jefferson Randolph, that he had penned her a particular farewell; she was not to see it until he had closed his eyes on the world, when she opened a certain drawer to which he had directed her. “Life’s visions are vanished, it’s dreams are no more,” went the deathbed adieu (see frontispiece). “I go to my fathers, I welcome the shore.” Less maudlin than expectant, Jefferson sought a death that promised peace and offered hope—not an assurance but a hope—of reunion with beloved friends in an afterlife.¹⁸

There is another way to describe Jefferson’s strength and vitality. His life was a composition, an unfinished symphony. His never quite complete but well-ordered dreamworld on Earth, the splendid pastoral retreat of Monticello, begun in 1769, did not have its last pillar in place until 1823. But the willful, undiminished composer-arranger (and amateur violinist) gave himself plenty of time to prepare for the next world, and in the spring of 1826 he formulated a serene final movement to life. That is when he put on paper his own cenotaph, a modest obelisk made, he wrote, of “coarse stone.” His sketch was folded up with the paper on which he had composed his wife’s epitaph forty-four years earlier.¹⁹

As he kept and chronicled so much of his correspondence, it does not require extensive detective work to discover how Jefferson settled on the obelisk. On February 27, 1826, he received a letter from Robert Mills, an architect and a correspondent of many years. In a P.S. to his letter, Mills remarked that he had designed an obelisk (he underlined the word) for the Bunker Hill monument, the cornerstone of which had recently been laid on the fiftieth anniversary of the battle by their mutual acquaintance, the returning war hero Lafayette. In preparing his reply, Jefferson scribbled in the margin of Mills’s letter, just under its salutation, the themes of the letter that most interested him, including the word obelisk. On March 3, he answered the architect: “Your idea of the obelisk monument is a very fine one,” and proceeded to sketch his own tombstone, tuck it away with keepsakes of his wife’s burial, and (within days) write out his final will.²⁰

What could be clearer than that Jefferson retained a perfect, passionate sense of order, method, and control to the very end? He was borne through a retirement of seventeen years that was marked by an intense intellectualism and disturbed (if that is the proper word) only by the abundance of visitors to his mountaintop. The Monticello idyll, if it ever truly existed, was broken in his last months. Watchful though he was with regard to his growing indebtedness, that condition suddenly became most urgent in the spring of 1826. Jefferson was more than $100,000 in debt when he died.

As the day of national jubilee neared and the bedridden patriarch lay dying, he called in his grandchildren, one by one, and pronounced parting advice for them. When his mother died on March 31, 1776, at fifty-seven, Jefferson made an emotionless notation in his account book. When his wife, Patty, died on September 6, 1782, at thirty-three, after her sixth pregnancy and a difficult birth, it was simply “my dear wife died this day.”²¹

Nowhere did he record for posterity how he missed Patty, though there are hints: A Dutch acquaintance encountering the widower in Annapolis in 1784 termed him “impervious since her loss to the feeble attractions of common society”; but a poignant verse that the couple wrote out together, as she lingered, offers what would seem more than ample evidence of a powerful closing scene. “Time wastes too fast, . . . like clouds of a windy day,” Thomas and Patty Jefferson had harmonized, these being the sad words first penned by the author of Tristram Shandy, Laurence Sterne. Sterne was the affecting novelist (with a talent for capturing human foibles) whom a young Jefferson looked to for sublime moral sentiments. In the hand of Thomas Jefferson, Sterne’s words provide the aching heart with its putative voice: “And every time I kiss thy hand to bid adieu, every absence which follows it are preludes to that eternal separation we are shortly to make!” Thomas outlived the less fortunate Patty by more than four decades, but he kept this souvenir of her death, a square piece of paper, in a drawer by his bedside. There it had lain, presumably unseen by any but him, for the remainder of his life, only to be found by his grieving daughter Martha.²²

Patty and their other daughter, Maria (she died in 1804), were the “two Seraphs . . . long shrouded in death” whom Jefferson summoned up in his deathbed adieu, written for his surviving daughter. Despite Martha’s having produced eleven healthy grandchildren for him, the absence on the mountaintop of her mother and sister had been indescribably felt. These two losses changed Thomas Jefferson most dramatically: After the first, he busied himself away from Monticello, as if memories made it painful to plan a future there; after the second, he was drained of energy and impelled toward retirement.²³

Certainly this time, when it was Jefferson’s end that had come after a long and fruitful career, death arrived with an undeniable appropriateness. We do not know how the grandchildren and great-grandchildren looked as they solemnly paraded into the dying man’s chamber, but it is not hard to imagine. It is reliably reported that he addressed “affectionate words of encouragement and practical advice, adapted to their several situations.” A few months earlier, before his final illness, Jefferson and his eldest grandson, Thomas Jefferson Randolph (known in the family as “Jeff” or “Jefferson”), had been in conversation about an event likely to occur in midsummer. The grandfather slipped in a remark, with apparent ease, to the effect that he did not expect to be alive in midsummer. He had a good idea about the seriousness of his condition when he spoke with his executor grandson.²⁴

To others around this time, he was equally direct. He wrote to the obelisk designer Mills: “My own health is quite broken down. For the last 10 mo. I have been mostly confined to the house.... My faculties, sight excepted[,] are very much impaired.” By way of a lighthearted refusal to comply with a friendly request from Senator Nathaniel Macon that would have required elaborate historical research on his part, Jefferson told the North Carolina Republican that he was “scarcely able to walk from one room to another, rarely out of pain, and with both hands so crippled that to write a page is nearly the work of a day.” Yet he wrote on, several letters each day, some quite lengthy. He remained as sociable as one could in his condition.²⁵

Like most of his contemporaries, Jefferson had watched others, young and old, weaken and die from fevers and other agitations that medicine could not yet combat. He had visited the bedside of Benjamin Franklin in Philadelphia in the early months of 1790 and accepted from the dying founder’s hand the final installment of his autobiography. He had shuddered at the news that his law professor and mentor, George Wythe, a notably serene and beloved man, had been poisoned by a greedy nephew seeking an early inheritance. Only very recently, Jefferson’s eldest grandchild, Anne Randolph Bankhead, had died at Monticello. The thirty-five-year-old succumbed on February 11, 1826, after giving birth prematurely.

As the wife of an aggressive alcoholic, Anne had led a difficult life. Charles Bankhead had gone so far amid drunken tirades as to stab her protective brother Jefferson in his side, on the courthouse steps of Charlottesville. It could not have helped her sick and troubled grandfather to witness another postpartum calamity, a repeat of the heartrending experiences of her Aunt Maria and the grandmother she had never known. Jefferson had been just a few feet away during Anne’s final travail, though himself too weak at that time to sit with her. In sorrow and pain, he wrote a short note to his grandson, her brother:

Bad news, my dear Jefferson, as to your sister Anne. She expired about half an hour ago. I have been so ill for several days that I could not go to see her till this morning, and found her speechless and insensible. She breathed her last about 11 o’clock. Heaven seems to be overwhelming us with every form of misfortune, and I expect your next will give me the coup de grace.

The ex-president’s doctor, Robley Dunglison, was present at Anne’s passing and recorded of his surviving patient: “It is impossible to imagine more poignant distress than was exhibited by him. He shed tears, and abandoned himself to every evidence of intense grief.”²⁶

The world of medicine that Jefferson subscribed to surmised that those female crises not traceable to uterine structure and function were related to nervous sensibility—feelings and emotions thought more potentially dangerous to the female of the human species. He owned a great many texts relating to medical science that detailed diagnoses and treatments; but, in spite of all he read, Jefferson did not speculate on possible means to save the childbearing women in his family. William Buchan, M.D., the author of Domestic Medicine, believed that women who died in labor did so out of a sudden and violent effect of fear. Recovery depended on allowing “necessary evacuations”—that is, for the woman to expel whatever noxious matter or energy remained. “Thus,” Buchan instructed, “the [female] sex often fall a sacrifice to their own imaginations, when there would be no danger, did they apprehend none.”²⁷

Deterministic doctors came up with a host of theories to explain what provoked bodily crises, but interventions were rarely successful, and death was greeted with resignation. It was fairly typical of medical literature at this time for the “thrills” and “vibrations” of the nervous system to be linked to the impressionable mind and metaphorical heart. Prescribing gender roles was just one symptom of the public’s desire, under unpromising medical conditions, to sustain health. This thinking led to a flowering of sentimental literature in which delicate women, constantly dying in childbirth, required the equally constant protection of wholesome, self-assured men. Under such conditions, the only chance a woman had to avoid a bitter end was to remain plain and unadorned, to be spiritually healthy and mentally secure, and to make herself immune to seductive promises. Any other kind of literature—such as bold novels in which a wide-eyed young woman is swept away by a dashing hero—or novels that stimulated the female sexual imagination—was thought, in the most literal sense, to be dangerous.²⁸

As a national leader, Jefferson had centered his political beliefs on a concept of health and on a quality of sympathy and generosity that extended across the population. He wished to create a democratic society that operated with “harmony and affection” and “a just equilibrium of the passions”—in other words, therapeutic considerations. Today, we continue to relate to his prescription for good government without understanding it as death-defying, that is, without understanding the real force of culture that stood behind it. Neither sentimental literature nor Jefferson’s sentimental vocabulary would have existed without the constant presence of death and inconsolable anguish.

The citizens of the United States of America lived with certain understandable fears in 1826. One was that life could cease at any moment, because the state of medical knowledge remained fairly primitive. As their diaries show, they knew well how to grieve, and they expected more of the same. In fact, historians tell us that a migration of population (the broader transmission of disease) caused the life span of the average American to decline throughout the first half of the nineteenth century.

As Jefferson’s end approached, the republic’s founders were nearly all entombed. His own consciousness of the situation emerged in a letter to Maria Cosway, the Anglo-Italian painter whom he had openly adored, many years before, when their paths crossed in Paris. Happily cloistered at the convent school she had established, she wrote to Jefferson in latter days with unfeigned nostalgia, and he responded: “For after one’s friends are all gone before them, and our faculties are leaving us too, one by one, why wish to linger in mere vegetation, as a solitary trunk in a desolate field, from which all its former companions have disappeared.”²⁹ This seems a rather morbid view of reality for one so busily occupied with the founding of a great university; still, it reveals Jefferson in the determined grip of time and mortality.

Jefferson never doubted that he had been permitted to live as full a life as was available to one of his generation. He told his surviving daughter, Martha, that he looked forward to whatever condition was to come. This is how his deathbed adieu reads: “I welcome the shore, which crowns all my hopes, or which buries my cares.” As life’s boisterous emotional sea³⁰ slowly dissolved into calm and acquiescence, he was ready to leave behind the memory of life’s pangs as well as happinesses. In exchange for them, he reached out for the postcorporeal form of his earlier vision, for a different “tranquil permanent felicity.”