Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power (50 page)

4. Never buy what you do not want, because it is cheap; it will be dear to you.

5. Pride costs us more than hunger, thirst, and cold.

6. We never repent of having eaten too little.

7. Nothing is troublesome that we do willingly.

8. How much pain have cost us the evils which have never happened.

9. Take things always by their smooth handle.

10. When angry, count ten, before you speak; if very angry, a hundred.

I
n a bizarre episode in his last years, history almost killed him. A New York artist arrived at Monticello to take a plaster cast of Jefferson's face—a life mask. Something went wrong, however, and the plaster almost suffocated him; only by banging a chair next to the sofa on which he lay did Jefferson manage to alert his butler Burwell Colbert to his plight. His life was saved, as his life had been shaped, by the act of a slave.

Musing about abolition—and presumably repatriation—in the fading spring, he wrote: “The revolution in public opinion which this cause requires, is not to be expected in a day, or perhaps in an age; but time, which outlives all things, will outlive this evil also.”

His health had been deteriorating since the first day of 1826. “It is now three weeks since a re-ascerbation of my painful complaint [a severe attack of diarrhea] has confined me to the house and indeed my couch,” Jefferson wrote a friend in Richmond on January 1, 1826. “Required to be constantly recumbent I write slowly and with difficulty.… Weakened in body by infirmities and in mind by age, now far gone into my 83rd year, reading one newspaper only and forgetting immediately what I read.” Still, he refused to give up riding, even though he had to mount his horse Eagle by putting the horse on a terrace below and lowering himself into the saddle.

W
ith the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence coming in the summer of 1826, organizers of the Washington celebrations were eager to bring Jefferson back to the capital for the day. He was too ill to consider it, but in his sun-filled cabinet he drafted a letter to commemorate the occasion. “All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man,” he wrote. “The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God. These are grounds of hope for others. For ourselves, let the annual return of this day forever refresh our recollections of these rights, and an undiminished devotion to them.”

These were to be his last words to the nation he had helped found, and which he had led through so much for. His farewell to Madison, his friend of half a century, was more personal but as heartfelt. “Take care of me when dead,” Jefferson asked in a letter to his old friend in February.

Still, he was not expecting an imminent death. After dispatching his letter about liberty to the Fourth of July commemoration in Washington, Jefferson wrote another on a different passion: wine, making arrangements to pay the customs collector at Baltimore the tax on an incoming shipment.

He would not live to drink it. Soon Jefferson was confined to his bed. He continued to read, browsing through the Bible, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, musing on the great tragedians as time and illness finally caught up with him in the last days of June.

The end was at hand.

FORTY
-
THREE

NO, DOCTOR, NOTHING MORE

The loss of Mr. Jefferson is one over which the whole world will mourn. He was one of those ornaments and benefactors of the human race, whose death forms an epoch, and creates a sensation throughout the whole circle of civilized man.

—Thomas Jefferson's nephew D
ABNEY
C
ARR
, J
R
.

O
N
S
ATURDAY
, J
UNE
24,
1826, Jefferson painfully put pen to paper to ask Dr. Robley Dunglison to call. Dunglison left Charlottesville as soon as he received the note. When he arrived, he found Jefferson had forced himself from his bedroom into the parlor, as though to greet him in the old ordinary way.

Dunglison put him back in bed. The doctor said he was “apprehensive that the attack would prove fatal. Nor did Mr. Jefferson himself indulge in any other opinion. From this time his strength gradually diminished and he had to remain in bed.”

Jefferson now marshaled his will toward the realization of one last mission: He wanted to survive until the Fourth of July.

As he lay dying, his daughter sat with him during the day. Thomas Jefferson Randolph and Nicholas Trist kept watch in the nights. Thomas Mann Randolph, Jr., the man who had been his son-in-law since moments after the return from Paris more than thirty years before, stayed away. “His mind was always clear—it never wandered,” his grandson Thomas Jefferson Randolph said. “He conversed freely, and gave directions as to his private affairs.”

Jefferson told his grandson what he wanted done about his coffin and his burial. There was to be nothing showy or grand. He would take his leave of the world with a simple Episcopal service and be laid to rest in the cemetery on the western slope of Monticello where he had interred Dabney Carr so many decades before—and then his mother, and then his wife.

Henry Lee, son of Light-Horse Harry Lee, called on Jefferson in the last days of June. Lee was on a mission: He was editing a new edition of his father's
Memoirs of the War,
a book that treated Jefferson's wartime governorship in an unfavorable light. Even in extremis, Jefferson could not resist one more chance to revise the history of those days. He invited Lee into his sick chamber on Thursday, June 29, 1826.

At Monticello, Patsy stopped Lee in the main part of the house. Her father was simply too sick to see him, she said. Saddened, Lee reflected that he was “never more to behold the venerable man, who had entered all the walks of politics and philosophy, and in all was foremost—and to whom the past, and the present, and all future ages are, and will be, so much indebted.”

Learning Lee was on hand, Jefferson, lying in his bed, sent for the visitor anyway. “My emotions at approaching
Jefferson's dying bed
I cannot describe,” Lee wrote. “You remember the alcove in which he slept. There he was extended, feeble, prostrate; but the fine and clear expression of his countenance not all obscured.” He recognized Lee and warmly offered his hand from the bed. “The energy of his grasp, and the spirit of his conversation, were such as to make me hope that he would yet rally—and that the superiority of mind over matter in his composition, would preserve him yet longer.”

Jefferson could not help Lee as he had wished. He was too ill to locate the papers he had promised him that gave Jefferson's side of the Arnold-Tarleton-Cornwallis story. He spoke of death in philosophical, even colloquial, terms. “He alluded to the probability of his death—as a man would to the prospect of being caught in a shower—as an event not to be desired, but not to be feared.”

Lee noticed an intriguing detail. Jefferson waved any buzzing flies away from the alcove himself, taking charge of the operation without help from the party gathered around him.

He wanted as much control as possible. “Mrs. Randolph afterwards told me this was his habit—that his plan was to fight old age off, by never admitting the approach of helplessness,” Lee wrote. After he left the bedroom for the main part of the house, Lee never laid eyes on Jefferson again.

J
efferson's rooms, ordinarily so private, filled as his strength ebbed. He said good-bye to his family, addressing each in turn. Of an eight-year-old grandson, he smiled and said, “George does not understand what all this means.” To a great-granddaughter he quoted the Gospel of Luke: “Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace.”

Thomas Jefferson Randolph suggested he was looking better, but Jefferson would have none of it. “Do not imagine for a moment that I feel the smallest solicitude about the result,” Jefferson said. “I am like an old watch, with a pinion worn out here, and a wheel there, until it can go no longer.” He was nearing what he had once referred to as “that eternal sleep which, whether with or without dreams, awaits us hereafter.”

He awoke to a noise and wondered whether he had heard the name of the Reverend Frederick Hatch, the rector of the parish. No, he was told. “I have no objection to see him, as a kind and good neighbor,” Jefferson said, turning over.

He had composed a poem for Patsy, alluding to his imminent reunion with Patty and Polly, and enclosed the lines in a little casket she did not open until after he died.

Life's visions are vanished, its dreams are no more;

Dear friends of my bosom, why bathed in tears?

I go to my fathers, I welcome the shore

Which crowns all my hopes or which buries my cares.

Then farewell, my dear, my lov'd daughter, adieu!

The last pang of life is in parting from you!

Two seraphs await me long shrouded in death;

I will bear them your love on my last parting breath.

Lying in his alcove bed, Jefferson mused about the Revolution, telling stories of the great drama. The smallest details reminded him of the largest of struggles. His bed curtains, he noted, had come from the first postwar importations in 1782.

In the chambers of his mind Jefferson may have been hurtling back into the past, hearing again the voices of the House of Burgesses or of the Pennsylvania State House or of Versailles or of the President's House, but part of him remained firmly rooted in the present, somehow keeping track of time, willing himself to live to see, however dimly, the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.

“A few hours more, Doctor, and it will be all over,” he said at one point, only to rally.

At five forty-five p.m. on the second, he took laudanum in grog. He was given tea three hours later and brandy four hours after that. He slept fitfully as the clock tinged.

Then, on the evening of the third, at about seven p.m., he asked Dunglison, “Ah! Doctor, are you still there?” Jefferson's central concern, though, was time: “Is it the Fourth?”

“It soon will be,” Dunglison replied.

Jefferson took what would be his last dose of laudanum, muttering “Oh God!”

Two hours later, at nine p.m., Dunglison woke him for more medicine.

“No, Doctor, nothing more,” Jefferson said.

The remaining three hours passed with agonizing slowness. Jefferson woke late on the night of the third and said, in questioning voice, “This is the Fourth?” Nicholas Trist remained silent, for it was not. Jefferson spoke again. “This is the Fourth?” He would not be stymied. Trist could not bring himself to disappoint the old man, and lied by nodding that yes, it was indeed the Fourth. “Ah,” said Jefferson. “Just as I wished.”

Perhaps he knew, somehow, that it was not, in fact, the anniversary of his declaration, at least not quite yet, and so Jefferson fought on, breathing still.

At last the clock above Jefferson's bed tinged twelve times, ushering in the Fourth of July.

Drifting in and out of consciousness, Jefferson appeared to dream of ancient crises met and overcome, murmuring about the Revolutionary Committee of Safety and gesturing as if he were writing. “Warn the Committee to be on the alert,” he said. He was dwelling on danger. In his last hours he was still struggling to defend the American cause, if only in his flickering imagination.

At four o'clock in the morning, he gave the attending slaves some directions. The final words of a man whose first memory was of being handed up to a slave on a pillow were addressed to his slaves. For a man who had worked for, and witnessed, so much change, in the end some things were as they were in the beginning.

At ten he stirred and stared at a grandson, trying but failing to signal what he wanted. It was Burwell Colbert who interpreted the glance correctly. Jefferson wanted his head elevated; the butler arranged him as he wished. An hour later he was moving his parched lips but saying nothing. Much to his evident relief, a grandson lifted a wet sponge to Jefferson's mouth.

It was over. At ten minutes before one o'clock on Tuesday, July 4, 1826, Thomas Jefferson died in his bed, three miles from Shadwell, where he had been born a subject of the British Empire eight decades before.

He died with his eyes open, his gaze fixed on his beloved alcove, his shelter from the storms of a world in which he had long warred, often triumphed, and always loved.

Thomas Jefferson Randolph touched his grandfather's cooling skin, gently closing the great man's eyes. Nicholas Trist quietly clipped a few small locks of his still-sandy hair, relics for the family. The wooden coffin built by John Hemings was made ready. The body was transferred to it, and the coffin was taken to the parlor to rest in state.

T
o me he has been more than a father, and I have ever loved and reverenced him with my whole heart,” Dabney Carr, Jr., wrote Nicholas Trist a week later. A grieving James Madison wrote Trist: “He lives and will live in the memory and gratitude of the wise and the good, as a luminary of science, as a votary of liberty, as a model of patriotism, and as a benefactor of humankind.” The professor of ancient languages at the University of Virginia said: “He ought to be revered by all who enjoy the advantage of being educated in his University, and ever remembered as one of the great men whom Virginia has produced. His great deeds are recorded in the epitaph which he wrote for his own tomb.”

Wormley Hughes, the gardener, dug Jefferson's grave on the western side of the mountain. The weather had been wet when the funeral party gathered inside Monticello for Jefferson's final journey. The mourners were few. Jefferson had not wanted a large service, and a delegation from the university in Charlottesville got a late start, missing much of the final rites.

A small group of family, friends, and slaves escorted the wooden coffin down the hill from the house. The Reverend Hatch read the burial office over the grave.

The service was conducted from the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer. “ ‘I am the resurrection and the life,' saith the Lord,” Hatch read, “ ‘he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: and whosoever liveth and believeth in me, shall never die.' ”

The promise of Paris was honored. In his life and in his will Jefferson had kept his word to Sally Hemings. Of the four children of Jefferson and Sally's who survived to adulthood, Beverly and Harriet had been allowed to leave Monticello in the early 1820s, and both are said to have lived as whites. According to their son Madison Hemings, “Harriet married a white man in good standing in Washington City.… She raised a family of children, and so far as I know they were never suspected of being tainted with African blood in the community where she lived or lives.” Madison was freed in Jefferson's will and moved to Ohio, as did Eston, who eventually settled in Wisconsin and changed his name to Eston Jefferson and declared himself to be white. Both were carpenter-joiners and farmers. In his will Jefferson also freed three other members of the Hemings family: Burwell Colbert, John Hemings, and Joe Fossett. Jefferson freed no other slaves—only Hemingses.

Sally Hemings herself, now fifty-three years old, soon moved to Charlottesville and lived without incident as a free woman. Jefferson did not name her in his will, yet there is evidence that his wishes may have been implicitly clear to Patsy and his heirs: Sally Hemings was to be treated with respect. In 1834, Patsy gave Sally Hemings “her time”—an unofficial emancipation, and Sally had been free in fact since Jefferson's death. In time—Sally died in 1835—she bequeathed some mementos of Jefferson to her children: a pair of his glasses, an inkwell, and a shoe buckle.

Jefferson's tenuous hold on life had been the only thing keeping his heavily indebted plantations from his creditors. The lottery he had hoped would rescue his affairs died with him. When Jefferson died, he owed creditors, in early twenty-first-century terms, between $1 million and $2 million—so much that Monticello and his slaves had to be sold. Jefferson's ideas and his public work endured. His personal world did not.

S
ix hundred miles away, John Adams, ninety years old, had died on the same day as Jefferson, also at home in bed, a coincidence the incumbent president, John Quincy Adams, called “visible and palpable marks of Divine Favor, for which I would humble myself in grateful and silent adoration before the Ruler of the Universe.” Preparing a eulogy to deliver at Faneuil Hall in Boston, Daniel Webster wrote his remarks one morning before breakfast, later recalling that when he was done “my paper was wet with my tears.” On a beautiful day in Boston, with President Adams in the hall, Webster painted an indelible portrait of Jefferson's and Adams's ascent to the American pantheon: “On our fiftieth anniversary, the great day of national jubilee, in the very hour of public rejoicing, in the midst of echoing and reechoing voices of thanksgiving, while their own names were on all tongues, they took their flight together to the world of spirits.”

On his own deathbed some of John Adams's final words were said to be about his old rival and friend: “Thomas Jefferson survives.”