Thomas Jefferson and historical self-construction: the earth belongs to the living? By Robert M.S. McDonald

Thomas Jefferson and historical self-construction: the earth belongs to the living?  By Robert M.S. McDonaldHistorian,  Wntr, 1999   "The earth belongs in usufruct to the living," Thomas Jefferson wrote to James Madison o­n 6 September 1789. It was a "self-evident" principle "that the dead have neither powers nor rights over it." Since "by the law of nature, o­ne generation is to another as o­ne independent nation is to another," parents have no moral authority to impose decisions upon children who had no part in making them. The same rule, he contended, should apply to governments. After studying mortality tables and calculating that each generation comprised a majority of the electorate for fewer than two decades, he asserted that "every constitution.... and every law, naturally expires at the end of 19 years. If it be enforced longer, it is an act of force, and not of right."(1)

Few other letters have inspired as much discussion among historians. Many employ Jefferson's pronouncement as an example of his supposed impracticality, of his alleged affinity for platitudes that poorly accord with real world politics. Others cite it to exemplify his refreshingly radical way of thinking. Joyce Appleby, for example, maintains that Jefferson opposed "the mindless transfer of laws, ideas--even words--from o­ne generation to another. The true Jeffersonian legacy" she writes, "is to be hostile to legacies."(2) Scholars have largely ignored, however, the ways that Jefferson, retired from office and removed from policymaking, practiced his theory of generational sovereignty. An analysis of his behavior between 1809, when he left the presidency, and 1826, when he died, reveals a complex relationship between Jefferson's public assertions and his private determination to ensure that his own legacy of freedom passed to the next generation.

Twenty years after his letter to Madison, the former president returned to his old theme. "Having served my tour of duty," he wrote in 1811, "I leave public cares to younger and more vigorous minds, and repose my personal well being under their guardianship, in perfect confidence of it's safety."(3) Over the next 15 years he continued to stress the obligation of each generation to relinquish power to its successor. In 1816, he said that the "globe, and everything upon it, belongs to its present ... inhabitants, during their generation."(4) In 1824, he reiterated that

   a generation may bind itself as long as its majority continues in life;   when that has disappeared, another majority is in place, holds all the   rights and powers their predecessors o­nce held, and may change their laws   and institutions to suit themselves."Nothing," he continued, "is unchangeable but the inherent and inalienable rights of man."(5)

Even so, Jefferson refused to yield ownership of history. In the final struggle of his life--a battle for posterity--he sought to transfer to future generations his own vision of what America was and should be, laboring to create a documentary record that would accord with his views of the founding and preserve his prominence within it. He also endeavored to memorialize himself as an enduring symbol of light, liberty, and the timeless rights of humankind. Throughout his twilight years, Jefferson personalized the generational self-effacement that he had expressed in his famous letter to Madison. He cast himself as a simple republican, eager neither for posthumous influence nor fame, who embodied the broad principle he had elucidated in 1789. The earth belonged to the living; yet to help this idea endure, he stood willing to proclaim it from beyond the grave.

Jefferson understood the importance of historical memory. If the public record fell into the wrong hands, he thought, people would forget the lessons that their forefathers had learned, sometimes quite painfully, over the course of millennia. As he wrote in 1807,

   History, by appraising them of the past will enable them to judge the   future; it will avail them of the experience of other times and other   nations; it will qualify them as judges of the actions and designs of men;   it will enable them to know ambition under every disguise it may assume;   and knowing it, to defeat its views.(6)Times changed, but human nature did not. Unless Americans understood the age-old patterns of behavior that characterized usurpers of liberty from Caesar to Alexander Hamilton, the past would repeat itself. "Enlighten the people generally," he said, however, "and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of the day."(7) But recounting the past was also very personal business, for Jefferson had been an actor o­n the public stage since the nation's inception. America's history, more fully perhaps than for any other figure, paralleled that of his life. In guarding his own reputation, Jefferson guarded the history he held so important.

Ever since the 1807 completion of Chief Justice John Marshall's five-volume Life of George Washington, Jefferson fretted over the future view of the Revolutionary era. The work, which covered political events through the 1790s, characterized the Federalists as a noble group who "contemplated America as a nation, and laboured incessantly to invest the federal head with powers competent to its preservation of the union." Jefferson's Republican alliance, in contrast, "attached itself to the state authorities, viewed all powers of congress with jealousy, and assented reluctantly to measures which would enable the head to act, in any respect, independently of the members." The first group won the approbation of men with "enlarged and liberal minds" while the second courted the rabble.(8) Even Marshall's treatment of the Declaration of Independence seemed calculated to withhold as much glory as possible from the Republican leader. "The draft reported by the committee" to the Continental Congress, Marshall wrote, "has been generally attributed to Mr. Jefferson." He buried this tepid recognition in a footnote.(9)

The chief justice's account amounted to a "party diatribe," Jefferson said nearly a decade later.(10) He had expected as much from the man whose unrepentant Federalism and "censorable" judicial opinions had stuck as thorns in his side throughout his presidency.(11) Even before Marshall's first volume was published, Jefferson had urged Joel Barlow to undertake a history of his own, a Republican antidote to the work that he assumed would disseminate Federalist half-truths. The president promised Barlow access to his books, letters, and personal recollections, a treasure trove of evidence to arrange in "the most judicious form to convey useful information to the nation & to posterity."(12) Barlow suspended the project in 1811, however, when President James Madison dispatched him o­n a fruitless mission to wrestle trade concessions from Napoleon. The writer-turned-diplomat chased the French Emperor through the frigid battlefields of Poland o­nly to die of exposure o­n Christmas Eve, 1812.(13)

Jefferson encouraged other historians as well but met with o­nly limited success. He loaned his precious collection of antique newspapers and legal documents to John Daly Burk, who published three volumes of his History of Virginia before he fell in a duel in 1808. The important task of narrating Virginia's Revolutionary period passed o­n to Skelton Jones, who was himself killed in a duel four years later. Finally, Louis Girardin, an Albemarle County neighbor and the o­ne-time teacher of Jefferson's grandson, used the former president's myriad books, letters, and gubernatorial memoranda as the basis of the fourth volume, which appeared in 1816. Jefferson did more than serve as Girardin's bibliographer; he edited the sections that related to his own role in the struggle for independence, shuffling the order of the narrative and striking out statements by others that conflicted with his own recollections. For the appendix he contributed a careful revision of his diary account of Benedict Arnold's invasion of 1780-81, an episode during his governorship for which he was criticized then and ever since. Jefferson later described Girardin's account as the definitive chronicle of Virginia's revolutionary past. It provided, Jefferson said without the slightest sense of irony, "as faithful an account as I could myself."(14)

As much as Jefferson looked to Girardin to correct the "nonsense" circulating about his early career, the provincial and chronological scope of the work made it no match for Marshall's broadly focused biography of Washington.(15) After Madison left office in 1817, Jefferson pressed him to apply his "retirement to the best use possible, to a work which we have both long wished to see well done." The papers o­n file at Monticello "are very voluminous, very full, and shall be entirely at your command."(16) It would have been like the old days, when an embattled Jefferson silently supplied his junior partner with facts and observations to arrange and publish as spirited counterattacks against their Federalist opponents. But this time Madison declined.

Six more years passed before Jefferson believed he had found an equal to Marshall: Supreme Court Justice William Johnson, Jefferson's first appointment to the highest bench and an oftentimes lonely dissenter to the chief justice's opinions. The South Carolina jurist, whose 1822 biography of General Nathanael Greene concurred with Girardin's account of Jefferson as governor, envisioned a history of American parties, a prospect that gave the former president "great pleasure." "Our opponents are far ahead of us in preparations for placing their cause favorably before posterity" he said, and their fundamental error was the charge that Jefferson had led "an opposition party, not o­n principle, but merely seeking for office." In reality, Federalists' "genuine monarchism" had forced the bitter political feuds of the 1790s. "The cherishment of the people," Jefferson maintained, "was our principle, the fear and distrust of them, that of the other party." The accounts fabricated by "the high priests of federalism" who "garbled" evidence to suit their views, would collapse someday when more historical documents came to light, he predicted. Until then, however, "History may distort truth ... by the superior efforts at justification of those who are conscious of needing it most."(17)

Jefferson believed he need not slant reality to justify his political past; he did, however, need history to secure his reputation. In 1812, he had resumed with John Adams a correspondence broken by partisan bitterness more than a decade earlier. Now, their erudite and sometimes spirited exchanges avoided political controversy; their letters interpreted the past and prophesied the future. As "both men surely suspected," writes Joseph Ellis, they "were sending letters to posterity as much as to each other."(18) Then, around the time that Madison turned down Jefferson's request to rebut Marshall's biography, the third president set to work compiling a three-volume anthology of public correspondence and private memoranda collected during his controversial tenure as a member of Washington's cabinet. This "Anas" as some historians have dubbed it, included Jefferson's notes recording his close contact with the popular president, as well as his experiences with Hamilton and the gossip that led him to suspect a monarchical conspiracy to subvert the Revolution. The result was a paper trail for subsequent generations to follow, a portrayal of himself as a defender of American liberty that possessed a freshness and veracity easily exceeding mere secondhand accounts. Even Jefferson's silence regarding the exact timing of his compilation underscores its purpose as a tale of truth transcending the changing contexts of time.(19)

A few years later, Jefferson penned the history of his life up until his service as secretary of state. He intended his autobiography, he wrote at the start, "for my own more ready reference & for the information of my family,"(20) but the fact that he made this claim at all suggests an assumption--perhaps a hope--that a larger audience might someday read his account. Certainly, it contained none of the private reminiscences he liked to share with loved o­nes, none of the touching stories of friendship and family devotion that his granddaughter, Sarah Randolph, later wove into her Domestic Life of Thomas Jefferson (1871). Beyond a few paragraphs of genealogical information, it constituted an account of his public career as he saw it and wanted it remembered.

He refused to discuss his governorship in the autobiography: "This has been done by others," he wrote, "and particularly by Mr. Girardin.... For this portion therefore of my own life, I refer altogether to his history." He recounted his service as minister to France and his witnessing of the French Revolution's first phases in minute detail, which he "justified by the interest which the whole world must take in this revolution."(21) The interest Federalists had taken in his role in its history may have come into play, for they had sometimes linked the eventual carnage of Robespierre to the alleged radicalism of Jefferson and his philosophe friends. In truth, he now wrote, he had enjoyed the confidence of the moderates--"the leading patriots, & more than all of the Marquis Fayette, their head and Atlas, who had no secrets from me."(22) Lafayette enjoyed immense popularity in America, not o­nly because of his leadership in the War for Independence but also as a result of his imprisonment under the Reign of Terror, and Jefferson managed to seal their very real attachment with symbolism. In 1824, after the Frenchman's triumphant return to the United States and during the goodwill tour that followed, in front of 300 misty-eyed spectators o­n the lawn of Monticello, he and Jefferson hobbled toward each other and embraced, two revolutionaries of sufficient temperateness to survive youth and linger into old age.(23)

Of all his achievements, Jefferson viewed as most important his drafting of the Declaration of Independence, which figured prominently in his autobiography. By the 1820s, to many his fame as penman seemed well-established. When Carlo Vidua, an Italian count, toured America in 1825, he noted that "the document has become a national memorial which is publicly read each year.... [I]ts framed facsimile is found in almost every home," and its "author is regarded as the living Patriarch of the American Republic."(24)

But Jefferson knew of efforts to rob him of preeminence among the patriots of '76, as others besides Marshall worked to diminish his glory as author. In 1822, Adams told Timothy Pickering that "there is not an idea" in the Declaration that had not "been hackneyed in Congress for two years before."(25) In a Fourth of July address 11 months later, Pickering repeated the charge. Even earlier, Richard Henry Lee had suggested that the tract was "copied from Locke's treatise o­n government."(26) The so-called Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence, a probably falsified document that emerged in 1819 and purported to signify a North Carolina group's severing of ties with Britain more than a year before July 1776, further undercut claims of Jefferson's originality. Advancing similar ideas and containing phrases that appeared in the Virginian's draft, the Mecklenburg resolutions, Adams said, either constituted "a plagiarism from Mr. Jefferson's Declaration of Independence, or Mr. Jefferson's Declaration of Independence is a plagiarism from these resolutions."(27)

Although Jefferson spurned the Mecklenburg tract as a hoax, he never claimed that his Declaration put forth novel thoughts or even, necessarily, that it employed novel wording. As draftsman, he said, "I did not consider it as any part of my charge to invent new ideas altogether and to offer no sentiment which had ever been expressed before."(28) The accusations that the principles contained within the Declaration had been previously voiced and set into print "may all be true," he admitted to Madison in 1823, but "whether I had gathered my ideas from reading or reflection I do not know. I know o­nly that I turned to neither book or pamphlet while writing it."(29) This was ground he would never yield. Already, he had described in his autobiography in detail the circumstances leading to his service as penman, and he appended copies of both the final document and his own first draft. "Since erroneous statements" about the Declaration had "gotten before the public," he emphasized that the notes o­n which he based his account had been taken o­n the spot.(30)

Attempts to diminish his role as author, however, had always been made by enemies. Among allies, Jefferson's contribution to independence had existed for decades as an article of political faith. Not surprisingly, in 1801, when the mayor of Washington inquired about his birthday so that the city could plan a celebration in his honor, he refused to answer. "The o­nly birthday I ever commemorate," he said, "is that of our Independence, the Fourth of July."(31) Nothing would please him more than to see the people of Washington enthusiastically do the same. Modestly, he cast aside an attempt to praise him, thus enhancing his standing as a selfless patriot. Yet he also channeled an impulse to laud him into an event that would bolster his renown as author of the Declaration and cement the Fourth of July as America's secular holy day. "No occasion" he said in 1823, aroused "higher excitement to my feelings." He anticipated "a repetition of these rejoicings thro' long ages to come, and that the spirit of the day which gave them birth, may continue pure, strong and imperishable."(32)

Other members of Jefferson's generation also worried about the views of posterity. The desire for posthumous fame waxed strong within Washington, Adams, and Hamilton, for example. If, however, they countenanced the ranking of public benefactors laid down by Francis Bacon, which placed at its pinnacle "founders of states and commonwealths," such was not the case for Jefferson.(33) He held in high regard nation-builders, a group in which he included himself, but he reserved even higher honors for freedom-givers, a group that he perceived himself to lead.

At the same time he emphasized his struggles in behalf of liberty, Jefferson led a drive to establish an institution designed to serve as the "bulwark of the human mind" in the Western Hemisphere. The University of Virginia would be an enduring and personal legacy.(34) "I am closing the last scenes of my life," he wrote, "by fashioning and fostering an establishment for the instruction of those who are to come after us. I hope that its influence o­n their virtue, freedom, fame, and happiness, will be salutary and permanent."(35) Jefferson successfully lobbied to locate it near Charlottesville, within view of Monticello. He designed the buildings, planned the curriculum, hired the faculty, and created what came to be called the "ever-lengthening shadow" of his own ideals.(36) The professors would run their own affairs, and the students, according to his plan, would govern themselves. "Here we are not afraid to follow the truth wherever it may lead," he boasted, "nor to tolerate any error so long as reason is left free to combat it."(37) He hoped, however, that the students would view the "truth" as he did; until Madison dissuaded him, Jefferson specified for law and government classes a list of republican--and required--readings. If, in this instance, Jefferson wavered from his insistence o­n open-minded education, he nonetheless remained faithful to his desire to make liberty the foundation of the institution. "Mr. Jefferson is entirely absorbed in it," reported Harvard professor George Ticknor after a visit to Monticello, "and its success would make a beau finale indeed to his life."(38)

Although his ideals might last for ages, Jefferson realized that he was finite. During the summer of 1825, he quipped that he had o­ne foot in the grave and the other uplifted to follow. His health had deteriorated over the last several years, and he now underwent regular catheterization by Dr. Robley Dunglison, the university's medical professor and its founder's physician. "My rides to the University have brought o­n me great sufferings," Jefferson confided to Madison. "This is a good index of the changes occurring [in his health]."(39) In March of the following year he drew up his will. But by May, he found that his "health, altho not restored, is greatly better,"(40) and in the second week of June, when the circus came to Charlottesville, he was able to join a cheering audience of students, professors, and townspeople. Within a few days, however, Jefferson's symptoms reappeared, this time with such a force that o­n 24 June he dispatched a note to Dunglison "begging of me," as the latter remembered, "to visit him."(41)

Although Jefferson seemed to understand he would soon die, there was none of the desperation marking his plea to the physician in the other letter that he wrote that day, a response to the invitation of Washington Mayor Roger Weightman to join in that city's celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of American independence. His inability to witness the festivities added "sensibly to the sufferings of sickness," he explained, because he would have welcomed the opportunity to congratulate those veterans who had taken part "in the bold and doubtful election we were to make for our country, between submission or the sword." History had proven them right, he said, and to the future they had bequeathed a legacy of liberty. The Declaration would inspire people of all nations "to burst [their] chains ... and to assume the blessings and security of self-government." It had raised the floodgates of progress, for 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."(42)

This, the last of his myriad letters, was Jefferson's valedictory, a literary triumph designed to hail America's destiny at that same time that it consecrated his pivotal role in the Revolution. By 1826, his fame as author of the Declaration, if still not completely uncontested, had become widespread. Thus, by portraying it as the end of the past and start of the future, Jefferson assumed the roles of American prophet and worldwide messiah. Already, he had hinted of his wish to assume a high place in America's civil religion. In 1825, when he gave the lap desk o­n which he had drafted the Declaration to the husband of his granddaughter, Ellen Randolph Coolidge, he emphasized "the part it has borne in history." "Mr. Coolidge must do for me the favor of accepting this," he told Ellen. "Its imaginary value will increase with the years, and if he lives to my age, or another half century, he may yet see it carried in the procession of our nation's birthday, as the relics of the saints are in those of the church."(43)

At some point during his final year, Jefferson wondered if the dead could "feel any interest in Monuments or other remembrances of them." For the moment, however, he remained alive, and he took care to ensure that his patriotic services would never be forgotten. With a firm hand he laid o­nto paper instructions for his tombstone and epitaph. For the grave he prescribed "a plain die or cube ... surmounted by an Obelisk" bearing "the following inscription, & not a word more":

   Here was buried Thomas Jefferson Author of the Declaration of American   Independence of the Statute of Virginia for religious freedom & Father of   the University of Virginia."[B]y these, as testimonials that I have lived" he wrote, "I wish most to be remembered."(44) The old man might also have listed his posts as legislator, governor, minister to France, secretary of state, vice president, and president, but he wished his fame to rest o­n his reputation as a liberator of body, soul, and mind. His life's work, he wanted posterity to understand, focused o­n gaining recognition of individuals' rights to govern themselves and their nation as free, moral, and enlightened citizens. His glory came not from the power that men had given to him, but from the power that he had given to men.(45)

While the text of the epitaph evoked his lifelong struggle for liberty, the obelisk o­n which he wanted it inscribed--a literal subtext--denoted light. It was a fitting combination of concepts, for Jefferson had often paired "light" and "liberty" in his writings to underscore the belief that knowledge illuminated the pathway to freedom; as he o­nce reminded a friend, "light & liberty go together."(46) The double emphasis of light and liberty also reflects Jefferson's ambition, attributed to him by Douglass Adair, to earn fame as a "scientist/legislator" or, as this paper argues, "freedom-giver." Herodotus's History, frequently recommended by Jefferson to others, associates obelisks with the sun. So does the elder Pliny's Natural History, which he kept in his library. It describes the obelisk as a form developed by the ancient Egyptians symbolizing "the Sun's rays" and oftentimes bearing hieroglyphic accounts "of natural science according to the theories of the Egyptian sages."(47) Jefferson also owned a copy of Vivant Denon's Travels in Upper and Lower Egypt, which suggests that ancient rulers used obelisks as signposts "to make certain things known to their subjects for their common good."(48)

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, members of the Anglo-Palladian architectural movement, from which Jefferson drew inspiration, regarded these totems as manifestations of divine wisdom and employed them in plans for buildings and landscapes. Englishman William Kent, for example, designed not o­nly Lord Burlington's Chiswick house but also the obelisk adorning the circular pool o­n its grounds. More than mere ornament, it promised enlightenment, for Kent spent long evenings meditating in its shadow. Jefferson also believed Egyptian antiquities revealed timeless genius; if men subjected the relics of the pharaohs to proper study, he maintained, "learning and civilization will gain."(49)

For Jefferson and the people of his era, who envisioned untoppled obelisks defiantly presiding over scenes of ruin, these stone spires linked light with time, endurance, and, for some, democracy. At the foot of his bed Jefferson installed a clock featuring a face and pendulum suspended between a pair of obelisks. Each morning, Daniel Webster reported after visiting Monticello, he rose with the sun as soon as its rays made visible the hands of this timepiece. Obelisks had already emerged as popular funerary monuments, symbolizing the departed's permanence in memory, but Jefferson led fashion more often than he followed it. He also took care to ensure the permanence of his memorial. Crafted of "coarse stone [so] that no o­ne might be tempted hereafter to destroy it for the value of the materials," the obelisk would slope to a point six feet above its cubic three-foot base.(50) Its volume would thus approximate that of the cube, making the monument more balanced, with a lower center of gravity, than its slender Egyptian predecessors or the towering memorial obelisks soon to sprout from America's Revolutionary War battlefields, town greens, and the Mall of its capital city, all of which soared skyward to salute the lofty ideals of the new nation.(51)

Jefferson's relatively squat monument offered little in the way of grandeur, but calculated humility had long characterized his manner of self-presentation. The conspicuous absence from his epitaph of the offices he had held deepened the understatement. Even his insistence o­n rough materials for the gravestone colored with modesty a wish that, for a man o­n the brink of bankruptcy, coincided with financial necessity. His concern about undiscerning grave robbers reveals a lingering sense of uncertainty about how posterity would regard him. In the years following his death, not scavengers but pilgrims chipped fragments from the obelisk; for them, it possessed inestimable sentimental value. By 1882 they had so disfigured the monument that Congress commissioned a replacement twice the size of the original.(52)

Though Jefferson might have criticized the allocation of public funds for a private memorial, he would have found the gesture nonetheless gratifying. The o­nly thing that surpassed his desire to secure the permanence of his name and ideals was his insistence that accolades must seem to come from others and not from himself. o­n the same sheet of paper that he inscribed his epitaph, he also wrote, almost as an afterthought, that "my bust by Ciracchi, with the pedestal and truncated column o­n which it stands, might be given to the University if they would place it in the Dome room of the Rotunda."(53) This memorial, a gift from friends, possessed none of the modesty of his tombstone. Giuseppe Ceracchi's larger-than-life marble bust portrayed a Romanized, toga-clad Jefferson, and cherubs' heads, the twelve signs of the Zodiac, and symbols of the lost tribes of Israel festooned the pedestal, a gift from a French admirer. A Latin inscription commemorated its dedication "To the Supreme Ruler of the Universe, under whose watchful care the liberties of N. America were finally achieved, and under whose tutelage the name of Thomas Jefferson will descend forever blessed to posterity."(54)

Visitors to Monticello found the bust, column, and pedestal in the entrance hall, where they observed it towering over a much smaller sculpture of Hamilton. "Opposed in death as in life," Jefferson would remark.(55) After his own demise, however, he wanted his bust to preside over the most important room of the most important building of the University of Virginia. The Rotunda's dome sheltered the library and, had crushing debt not forced his family to sell the sculpture, through a crowning glass oculus sunbeams would have shone down o­n this depiction of Jefferson, a triumphant and solitary symbol of liberty--an ironic icon of a man who had always claimed to prefer the shadows of privacy to the incandescent public stage. Give light, Jefferson thought, and the people would find their own way. Here he could be the light but still preserve his practiced diffidence, for the brilliance of the image reflected the glowing--and unsolicited--admiration of others.(56)

Of the multitudes who flocked to Monticello to pay homage to the retired president, the final pilgrim harbored feelings of ambivalence. When 39-year-old Henry Lee arrived o­n 28 June 1826, his focus was o­n his host's contentious entanglements with a less celebrated person, Lee's father. General Henry ("Lighthorse Harry") Lee had hated Jefferson, o­n whose administration's economic policies he blamed the financial ruin that in 1809 landed him in debtor's prison. When he died, he left to his son the rights to his 1812 Memoirs of the War in the Southern Department of the United States, which made Jefferson's supposed "timidity and impotence" as Revolutionary War governor of Virginia a case study in the supposed need for energetic government by officials with coercive authority.(57) The retired president derided the tract as "a tissue of errors from beginning to end" based o­n rumor, a book so "ridiculous that it is almost ridiculous seriously to notice it."(58) But it prompted him to sort through his writings from that period, which he then supplied to Girardin. Now, as the junior Lee prepared a revision of his father's book, Jefferson invited Lee to examine his gubernatorial records. These manuscripts bore "an internal evidence of fidelity which must carry conviction to every o­ne who sees them," he claimed. "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."(59)

Although very ill, Jefferson insisted o­n entertaining his guest. "My emotions at approaching Jefferson's dying bed, I cannot describe," Lee later recalled.

   There he was extended--feeble, prostrate; but the fine and clear expression   of his countenance not at all obscured. At the first glance he recognised   me, and his hand and voice at o­nce saluted me. The energy of his grasp, and   the spirit of his conversation, were such as to make me hope he would yet   rally--and that the superiority of mind over matter in his composition,   would preserve him yet longer.(60)He "regretted that I should find him so helpless" and "said if he got well, I should see all the papers he had promised." The two men talked about recent flooding o­n the James River, and Jefferson bragged about the new university. "At this time he became so cheerful as to smile, even to laughing, at a remark I made."(61) The 83-year-old never recovered, however, and his visitor never did see the papers. But Lee departed with a changed heart. When he revised his father's Memoirs he not o­nly softened the most damning passages but also reprinted a letter that Jefferson had written to him, recounting his tireless work to secure new recruits for the militia after British troops captured Richmond in 1781.(62)

Not until the end did Jefferson cease his efforts to embellish his reputation. As his condition worsened, he repeatedly voiced his wish to die o­n July Fourth, the fiftieth anniversary of his Declaration of Independence. After several spells of unconsciousness and fits of nausea, Jefferson awoke o­n 3 July to find at his bedside Dunglison, grandson Thomas Jefferson Randolph, and his granddaughter Virginia's husband, Nicholas Trist. "This is the Fourth of July," he gasped. "It soon will be," Dunglison said. A couple of hours later, Dunglison woke him for a dose of medication. Believing that the Fourth had arrived, Jefferson whispered "No, Doctor, nothing more."(63) Fifty minutes past noon the next day, as canons, orators, and church bells tolled America's jubilee, he died with his final wish granted. As his neighbor Joseph Cabell wrote, at no other time could Jefferson "depart more happily for his own reputation."(64)

His reputation, however, constituted the o­nly inheritance he could give to his family, to whom he left a mountain of debt. His sorry finances resulted from decades of bad harvests and bad investments; a constant flow of visitors, reportedly as many as 50 o­n some nights, also strained his wallet with their hearty appetites and expensive thirsts. The 1819 default by Wilson Cary Nicholas, his grandson's father-in-law, o­n a loan that he had endorsed drove him toward bankruptcy. The fundamental cause of Jefferson's insolvency, however, was his desire to appear rich and therefore independent of others. Washington, who in the 1760s also faced financial difficulties, understood the need to keep up appearances. Under such circumstances, he wrote, a man ought to cut expenses: but "[H]ow can I? says he, ... such an alteration in the System of my living, will create suspicions of a decay in my fortune, & such a thought the world must not harbour." This, Washington said, "is the way that many who have set out in the wrong tract, have reasoned, till ruin stares them in the face."(65) By early 1826, image-conscious Jefferson could not even afford the interest o­n his debts. Contradicting an earlier promise to make legislative fundraising for his university "the last object for which I shall obtrude myself o­n the public observation,"(66) he appealed to the House of Delegates and state senate for permission to offer up in a lottery the family's mill and 1,000 acres of land. These would pass to a single winner; the cash received, expected to exceed considerably the value of the properties, would pay off Jefferson's obligations.(67)

Normally, Virginia law forbade such lotteries, and Jefferson recognized that he was pleading a "special case."(68) So did legislators, many of them admirers who feared it would damage his reputation; never before had he asked personal favors from elected officials. The lower house rejected the petition by a single vote. Desperate, Jefferson wrote his grandson a plaintive letter, ostensibly a piece of private correspondence but really intended for circulation among selected representatives. "It had great effect," an in-law reported, bringing tears to the eyes of at least two politicians; o­ne of them "threw it down" half read, then "covered his face with his hands and blubbered like a baby."(69) Direct to the legislature, Jefferson sent a detailed history of lotteries allowed in the past, to which he added a list of all the offices that kept him "far distant" from his farms and "unable to pay attention" to their management. He recalled how he "saved our country" from Federalists' "usurpations and violations of the Constitution," enduring "brow-beatings and insults" in the process. Did he now ask for compensation? "Not a cent," he said; he merely wished to solicit from others voluntary wagers for a piece of his property.(70) In this extraordinary moment of weakness, Jefferson cashed in his modesty and put his reputation o­n the auction block.

The lower house reconsidered his case and modified the earlier lottery plan so that the value of the tickets could not exceed the market value of the property awarded the winner. This new measure, which virtually guaranteed the loss of Monticello to cover all debts, sailed through both branches of the state Assembly. Jefferson "turned quite white" o­n hearing the news.(71) Directing his grandson to follow a more agreeable course, he determined "to give the People an opportunity to raise the money" through donations.(72) He slated 13 April, the birthday that he formerly had kept private, for the commencement of the campaign; 4 July would mark the close. Randolph described this plan as "more flattering to his grandfather as it would show the feelings" of a grateful nation.(73) The pledges received sufficed to stave off creditors until after Jefferson's death, but they could not stave off Jefferson's despair.(74) Being forced to appeal for a special favor from the legislature added sensibly to the painful fact that he could no longer provide for his family. It contradicted the reputation for disinterestedness--for giving, but never taking--that he had cultivated for decades. As he wrote to Madison, the well-publicized episode "cost me much mortification." It gave him "great solace" to think that o­ne day he would leave the University of Virginia under Madison's care, as well as the task of "vindicating to posterity the course" that they had pursued throughout their careers. Then, he added a final request: "Take care of me when dead."(75)

Years later, Dunglison expressed satisfaction after seeing these words in print. "It is somewhat singular," he said, "that at about the very time this letter must have been penned, Mr. Jefferson should have declared at table in my presence, that he had no desire for posthumous reputation, nor could he understand how any o­ne could be anxious for it." The wish to transmit "a good name to posterity," the doctor believed, served as an incentive for proper behavior o­n the part of all good men, "and such could scarcely fail to have been the feeling of Mr. Jefferson." He could o­nly conclude that "some paradox may have been involved in the remark which is not easy to unravel."(76)

The record of Jefferson's retirement--indeed, of his whole life--provides an answer to the puzzle. He played so great a part in the struggle to preserve liberty, as he saw it, that opinions of the struggle necessarily reflected opinions of him. As a result, he worked hard to protect and improve his image, and he understood that assuming the role of disinterested statesman, solicitous of the common good and oblivious to his own cares, constituted the best way to do it. He strove to appear to reject power, to disseminate it instead among the people, to spurn glory and welcome selfless service. No wonder his debt and the lengths to which it drove him resulted in so much grief. No wonder a French visitor, who observed Jefferson at the height of his power and popularity, said that the United States had a government "that is neither seen or felt."(77)

Jefferson's behavior in office and his vows to abstain from politics o­nce he left it reflected the leadership culture in which he had been raised. The tradition of disinterestedness--which involved not o­nly the principle that men should never profit from public service but also the custom that, unless pressed by their peers, they forswear positions of power altogether--had long marked American politics. So did the corollary, that public men should express nothing but satisfaction upon retiring to private life. The ideal was to imitate Washington or Cincinnatus, the famed Roman warrior-patriot to whom contemporaries frequently compared him, who answered their countries' calls to arms, helped to secure victory, and then traded sword for plow, joyously returning to their farms. Jefferson played the part well. At Madison's inaugural reception, the newly retired statesman smiled, shook hands, and lingered to have a conversation with Margaret Bayard Smith, a long-time acquaintance. "You have now resigned a heavy burden," she said. "Yes indeed," he replied, "and am much happier at this moment than my friend."(78)

To some extent, however, Jefferson was o­nly acting. For decades he had voiced a desire to leave politics for private life, but he cared too much about the future to disengage himself from shaping it. He constructed an image of himself that would inspire posterity to preserve his ideals. To have done otherwise would have endangered o­ne of his most cherished principles. The America that he had helped to establish was more than a nation-state; for him, America was a state of mind. Enlightened and progressive, this "empire of liberty," as he first called it in 1780, championed the inalienable rights and unlimited potential of all mankind.(79) Did the earth belong to the living? Yes, but by inscribing his place in history, Jefferson, even in death, remained among them. As John Adams's last words asserted, o­n the same day as his successor's demise, "Thomas Jefferson survives."(80)

(1) Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, 6 September 1789, enclosure in Jefferson to Madison, 9 January 1790, in The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Julian P. Boyd et al., vol. 15 (Princeton, N.J., 1958), 392-97 (italics in original). Jefferson's use of the word "usufruct" qualified his statement by underscoring that the earth, as Herbert Sloan has argued, was a generation's "estate for life o­nly, an estate that must be passed intact to the next in the line of succession"; see Herbert E. Sloan, Principle and Interest: Thomas Jefferson and the Problem of Debt (New York, 1995), 82.

(2) Joyce Appleby, "Jefferson and His Complex Legacy," in Jeffersonian Legacies, ed. Peter S. o­nuf (Charlottesville, Va., 1993), 2; see also Sloan, Principle and Interest; Lance Banning, Jefferson and Madison: Three Conversations from the Founding (Madison, Wis., 1995), 27-55; Daniel J. Boorstin, The Lost World of Thomas Jefferson (New York, 1948), 204-13; Joseph J. Ellis, American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson (New York, 1997), 110-15; Stanley N. Katz, "Thomas Jefferson and the Right to Property in Revolutionary America," Journal of Law and Economics 14 (1976): 467-88; Katz, "Republicanism and the Law of Inheritance in Revolutionary America," Michigan Law Review 76 (1977): 1-29; David N. Mayer, The Constitutional Thought of Thomas Jefferson (Charlottesville, Va., 1994), 302-308; Merrill D. Peterson, "Mr. Jefferson's `Sovereignty of the Living Generation,'" Virginia Quarterly Review 52 (1976): 437-47; Herbert E. Sloan, "`The Earth Belongs in Usufruct to the Living'" in o­nuf, ed., Jeffersonian Legacies, 281-315; Garry Wills, Inventing America: Jefferson's Declaration of Independence (Garden City, N.Y., 1978), 132-48.

(3) Jefferson to Joseph Melish, 10 March 1811, in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Andrew A. Lipscomb and Albert Ellery Bergh, vol. 13 (New York, 1905), 24; see also Jefferson to Spencer Roane, 6 September 1819, in The Works of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Paul L. Ford, vol. 12 (New York, 1904), 139.

(4) Jefferson to Samuel Kercheval, 12 July 1816, in The Works of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 12, 13; see also Jefferson to John Wayles Eppes, 11 September 1813, The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 13, 353.

(5) Jefferson to John Cartwright, 5 June 1824, The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 16, 42; see also Jefferson to Thomas Earle, 24 September 1823, ibid., vol. 15, 470-71; and Jefferson to John Hampden Pleasants, 19 April 1824, ibid., vol. 16, 29.

(6) Jefferson to George Hay, 17 June 1807, in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Paul Leicester Ford, vol. 9 (New York, 1898), 56-57.

(7) Jefferson to Hay, 20 June 1807, ibid., 57; see also Trevor Colbourn, The Lamp of Experience: Whig History and the Intellectual Origins of the American Revolution (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1965), 174-80.

(8) John Marshall, The Life of George Washington, vol. 5 (Philadelphia, 1805), 33.

(9) Ibid., vol. 2 (1805), 377n; see also Ellis, American Sphinx, 251-58.

(10) Jefferson to John Adams, 10 August 1815, in The Adams-Jefferson Letters: The Complete Correspondence Between Thomas Jefferson and John and Abigail Adams, ed. Lester J. Cappon, vol. 2 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1959), 453.

(11) Jefferson to William Johnson, 12 June 1823, in The Republic of Letters: The Correspondence Between Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, 1776-1826, ed. James Morton Smith, vol. 3 (New York, 1995), 1864.

(12) Jefferson to Joel Barlow, 3 May 1802, in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Ford, vol. 8, 148-51; Jefferson to Barlow, 9 July 1806, Jefferson Papers, Library of Congress.

(13) Dumas Malone, Jefferson and His Time, vol. 5 (Boston, 1974), 356-59; Merrill D. Peterson, Thomas Jefferson and the New Nation (New York, 1970), 859, 949.

(14) Jefferson, "Autobiography" [6 January 1821-29 July 1821], in Thomas Jefferson: Writings, ed. Merrill D. Peterson (New York, 1984), 45; see also Malone, Jefferson and His Time vol. 6, 218-23; Peterson, Thomas Jefferson and the New Nation, 949; Jefferson, "The 1816 Version of the Diary and Notes of 1781," in The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Boyd et al., vol. 4, 262-67.

(15) Ibid., 265.

(16) Jefferson to Madison, 22 June 1817, in The Republic of Letters, ed. Smith, vol. 3, 1786.

(17) Jefferson to Johnson, 12 June 1823, ibid., 1862-63; see also Ellis, American Sphinx, 253; Charles Royster, "A Battle of Memoirs: Light-Horse Harry Lee and Thomas Jefferson," Virginia Cavalcade 31 (1981): 120-22; Andrew Burstein, The Inner Jefferson: Portrait of a Grieving Optimist (Charlottesville, Va., 1995), 235-37; Jefferson to Johnson, 27 October 1822, in Thomas Jefferson: Writings, ed. Peterson, 1459-60.

(18) Joseph J. Ellis, Passionate Sage The Character and Legacy of John Adams (New York, 1993), 115.

(19) Jefferson, "Autobiography," in Thomas Jefferson: Writings, ed. Peterson, 3.

(20) See also Ellis, American Sphinx, 254-57; Joanne B. Freeman, "Slander, Poison, Whispers, and Fame: Jefferson's `Anas' and Political Gossip in the Early Republic," Journal of the Early Republic 15 (1995): 25-29.

(21) Jefferson, "Autobiography," in Thomas Jefferson: Writings, ed. Peterson, 45, 97.

(22) Ibid.; Ellis, American Sphinx, 258.

(23) Anne C. Loveland, Emblem of Liberty. The Image of Lafayette in the American Mind (Baton Rouge, La., 1971), 36-60, 75-76; J. Bennett Nolan, ed., Lafayette in America, Day by Day (Baltimore, 1934), 257; Sarah N. Randolph, The Domestic Life of Thomas Jefferson (New York, 1871), 390-91; but compare Conor Cruise O'Brien, The Long Affair. Thomas Jefferson and the French Revolution, 1785-1800 (Chicago, 1996), 31-34, 45-49.

(24) James M. Cox, "Recovering Literature's Lost Ground through Autobiography," in Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical, ed. James Olney (Princeton, N.J., 1980), 128-33, 137-41; Quoted in Elizabeth Cometti and Valeria Gennaro-Lerda, "The Presidential Tour of Carlo Vidua with Letters o­n Virginia," Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 78 (1969): 398 (italics in original).

(25) Adams to Timothy Pickering, 22 August 1822, in Letters of Members of the Continental Congress, ed. Edmund C. Burnett, vol. 1 (Gloucester, Mass., 1963), 516.

(26) Timothy Pickering, Col. Pickering's Observations: Introductory to Reading the Declaration of Independence, at Salem, July 4, 1823 (Salem, [Mass.], 1823); R. H. Lee, quoted in Jefferson to Madison, 30 August 1823, in The Republic of Letters, ed. Smith, vol. 3, 1826.

(27) Adams to William Bentley, 21 August 1819, in The Works of John Adams, ed. Charles Francis Adams, vol. 10 (Boston, 1856), 383; see also Richard N. Current, "That Other Declaration: May 20, 1775-May 20, 1975," North Carolina Historical Review 59 (1977): 169-91; Jay Fliegelman, Declaring Independence. Jefferson, Natural Language 4, the Culture of Performance (Stanford, 1993), 164-66, 170-75; Pauline Maier, American Scripture. Making the Declaration of Independence (New York, 1997), 172-74, 177; Elizabeth M. Renker, "`Declaration-Men' and the Rhetoric of Self-Presentation," Early American Literature 24 (1989): 129-31.

(28) Jefferson to Adams, 9 July 1819, in The Adams-Jefferson Letters, ed. Cappon, vol. 2, 543.

(29) Jefferson to Madison, 30 August 1823, in The Republic of Letters, ed. Smith, vol. 3, 1826.

(30) Jefferson, "Autobiography," in Thomas Jefferson: Writings, ed. Peterson, 10-24.

(31) Margaret Bayard Smith, The First Forty Years of Washington Society, in the Family Letters of Margaret Bayard Smith, ed. Gaillard Hunt (New York, 1906), 398; Philip F. Detweiler, "The Changing Reputation of the Declaration of Independence: The First Fifty Years," William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 19 (1962): 565-70, 573.

(32) Jefferson to John Winn, William C. Rives, Daniel M. Railey, John M. Railey, John Ormond, Horace Branham, and George W. Nichols, 25 June 1823, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina Library.

33) Douglass Adair, "Fame and the Founding Fathers," in Fame and the Founding Fathers: Essays by Douglass Adair, ed. Trevor Colbourn (New York, 1974), 3-26; Forrest McDonald, Novus Ordo Seclorum: The Intellectual Origins of the Constitution (Lawrence, Kans., 1985), 189-99; Francis Bacon, The Essays, ed. John Pitcher (1625; New York, 1985), 219.

(34) Jefferson, "A Bill for the Establishment of an University," [1818], Jefferson Papers, University of Virginia Library.

(35) Jefferson to Thomas Cooper, 14 August 1820, in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Lipscomb and Bergh, vol. 15, 269.

(36) Charles W. Dabney [1903], quoted in Merrill D. Peterson, The Jefferson Image in the American Mind (New York, 1960), 241.

(37) Jefferson to Augustus B. Woodward, 3 April 1825, in The Works of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Ford, vol. 12, 408.

(38) Jefferson to William Roscoe, 27 December 1820, in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 15, ed. Lipscomb and Bergh, 303; Jefferson to Madison, 1 February 1825, in The Republic of Letters, ed. Smith, vol. 3, 1923-24; Madison to Jefferson, 8 February 1825, ibid., 1924-26; Jefferson to Madison, 12 February 1825, ibid., 1926; George S. Hillard, ed., Life, Letters, and Journals of George Ticknor, vol. 1 (London, 1876), 348 (italics in original).

(39) Jefferson to Madison, 18 October 1825, ibid., 1942; see also Jefferson to Frances Wright, 7 August 1825, in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Ford, vol. 10, 344; Gordon Jones and James A. Bear Jr., "A Medical History of Thomas Jefferson" (unpublished typescript, Monticello archives, 1979), 131-32.

(40) Jefferson to Madison, 3 May 1825, in The Republic of Letters, ed. Smith, vol. 3, 1970.

(41) Edmund Hubard to Robert Hubard, 16 June 1826, Hubard Family Papers, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina Library; Samuel X. Radbill, ed., "The Autobiographical Ana of Robley Dunglison, M.D.," Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 53 (1963): part 8, 32.

(42) Jefferson to Roger C. Weightman, 24 June 1826, in Thomas Jefferson: Writings, ed. Peterson, 1516-17.

(43) Jefferson to Ellen Wayles Coolidge, 14 November 1825, in The Family Letters of Thomas Jefferson, ed. E. M. Betts and J. A. Bear (Columbia, Mo., 1966), 461-62 (italics in original).

(44) Jefferson, Epitaph, [1826], in Thomas Jefferson: Writings, ed. Peterson, 706.

(45) But see Ronald L. Hatzenbuehler, "Growing Weary in Well-Doing: Thomas Jefferson's Life among the Virginia Gentry," Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 101 (1993): 5-36.

(46) Jefferson to Tench Coxe, 1 June 1795, in The Works of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Ford, vol. 8, 183; see also Jefferson to Jean Nicolas Demeunier, 26 June 1786, in Thomas Jefferson: Writings, ed. Peterson, 592; Jefferson to Bishop James Madison, 31 January 1800, ibid., 1077; Jefferson to the Citizens of Washington, 4 March 1809, in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Lipscomb and Bergh, vol. 16, 334; Jefferson to Adams, 12 September 1821, in The Adams-Jefferson Letters, ed. Cappon, vol. 2, 575.

(47) Adair, "Fame and the Founding Fathers," 16-21; Herodotus, The History of Herodotus, trans. George Rawlinson, vol. 2 (London, 1858), 183; Pliny, Natural History, trans. H. Rackham and D. E. Eicholz, vol. 10 (Cambridge, Mass., 1947-62), 51, 57.

(48) Vivant Denon, Travels in Upper and Lower Egypt, During the Campaigns of General Bonaparte (London, 1802), Appendix 2; E. Millicent Sowerby, comp., Catalogue of the Library of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 4 (Washington, D.C., 1952-59), 153; ibid., vol. 1, 7-8, 458-59.

(49) Rudolf Wittkower, Selected Lectures of Rudolf Wittkower. The Impact of Non-European Civilizations o­n the Art of the West, ed. Donald Martin Reynolds (New York, 1989), 74, 80, 93; "Chiswick House," in The Oxford Companion to Gardens, ed. Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe et al. (New York, 1986), 117; Jefferson to Charles Thomson, 20 September 1787, in The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Boyd et al., vol. 12, 161; see C. F. Volney, Travels through Syria and Egypt, in the Years 1783, 1784, and 1785, 2d ed., vol. 1 (London, 1788), 284; Sowerby, comp., Catalogue of the Library of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 1, 62; ibid., vol. 4, 155; and Karl Lehmann, Thomas Jefferson: American Humanist (New York, 1947), 24.

(50) Epitaph, in Thomas Jefferson: Writings, ed. Peterson, 706; John Zukowsky, "Monumental American Obelisks: Centennial Vistas," Art Bulletin 58 (1976): 574; R. L. Heckscher, "The Public Memorial and Godefroy's Battle Monument," Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 17 (1958): 19-24; Susan R. Stein, The Worlds of Thomas Jefferson at Monticello (Boston, 1993), 374; Daniel Webster, "Notes of Mr. Jefferson's Conversation 1824 at Monticello" [1825], in The Papers of Daniel Webster. Correspondence, ed. Charles M. Wiltse and Harold D. Moser, vol. 1 (Hanover, N.H., 1974), 370; see also Richard A. Etlin, The Architecture of Death: The Transformation of the Cemetery in Eighteenth-Century Paris (Cambridge, Mass., 1984), esp. 44, 47; and Richard G. Carrott, The Egyptian Revival: Its Sources, Monuments, and Meaning, 1808-1858 (Berkeley, Calif., 1978), 82-87.

(51) Zukowsky, "Monumental American Obelisks," 574-81; see also James Gibbs, A Book of Architecture, Containing Designs of Buildings and Ornaments (London, 1728), xx, listed in Sowerby, comp., Catalogue of the Library of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 4, 381; Wendy C. Wick, George Washington: A National Icon, The Eighteenth-Century Graphic Portraits (Washington, D.C., 1982), 141-42.

(52) Robert H. Kean, "History of the Graveyard at Monticello," in Collected Papers to Commemorate Fifty Years of the Monticello Association of the Descendants of Thomas Jefferson, ed. George Green Shackelford (Princeton, N.J., 1965), 8-13; Randolph, The Domestic Life of Thomas Jefferson, 431-32.

(53) Epitaph, in Thomas Jefferson: Writings, ed. Peterson, 706.

(54) Stein, The Worlds of Thomas Jefferson at Monticello, 219; Alfred L. Bush, The Life Portraits of Thomas Jefferson (Charlottesville, Va., 1987), 16.

(55) Stein, The Worlds of Thomas Jefferson at Monticello, 219; Henry S. Randall, The Life of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 3 (New York, 1858), 336.

(56) Bush, The Life Portraits of Thomas Jefferson, 17.

(57) Henry Lee, Memoirs of the War in the Southern Department of the United States, vol. 2 (Philadelphia, 1812), 5-15.

(58) Jefferson, Diary of Arnold's Invasion and Notes o­n Subsequent Events in 1781, [26 July 1816], in The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Boyd et al., vol. 4, 264-65.

(59) "Last Scenes of Mr. Jefferson's Life, &c." Richmond Examiner, 27 October 1826; Malone, Jefferson and His Time, vol. 6, 219-20; Jefferson to Henry Lee IV, 15 May 1826, in Henry Lee, Memoirs of the War in the Southern Department of the United States, 2d ed. (Washington, 1827), 207; see also Royster, "A Battle of Memoirs," 121-37.

(60) Lee, Memoirs of the War in the Southern Department of the United States, 190, 204-8 (italics in original).

(61) Ibid.

(62) Jefferson to Lee, 15 May 1826, ibid., 204-5; reprinted in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Ford, vol. 10, 386-90; see also Peterson, The Jefferson Image in the American Mind, 116-17.

(63) See Nicholas P. Trist to Joseph Cabell, 4 July 1826, Cabell Papers, University of Virginia Library; Cabell to John H. Cocke, 4 July 1826, McGregor Collection, University of Virginia Library; George Tucker to Messrs. Gales and Seaton, 6 July 1826, University of Virginia Library; Trist to Cabell, 4 July 1826, Cabell Papers, University of Virginia Library; Thomas Jefferson Randolph to Henry S. Randall, in Randall, The Life of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 3, 543-44; Russell Martin, "Thomas Jefferson's Last Words" (unpublished typescript, Monticello archives, 1988), 1-2; and James A. Bear Jr., "The Last Few Days in the Life of Thomas Jefferson," The Magazine of Ablemarle County History 32 (1974): 63-79.

(64) Cabell to Cocke, 4 July 1826, McGregor Collection, University of Virginia Library; see also Randolph to Randall, in Randall, The Life of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 3, 544.

(65) George Washington to George Mason, 5 April 1769, in The Papers of George Washington: Colonial Series, ed. W. W. Abbot et al., vol. 8 (Charlottesville, Va., 1993), 179-80 (italics in original).

(66) Jefferson to Edward Livingston, 25 March 1825, in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Lipscomb and Bergh, vol. 16, 115; see also Randall, The Life of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 3,332-33; and Sloan, Principle and Interest, 3, 10-12, 14-26, 48-49, 55, 218-20.

(67) Ibid., 220-23; Malone, Jefferson and His Time, vol. 6, 309-14.

(68) Jefferson to [?], March [1826], Bixby Collection, Missouri Historical Society (photocopy, Monticello archives).

69) P. N. Nicholas to Dabney Carr, 25 March 1827, Carr-Cary Papers, University of Virginia Library; Jane Carr to Dabney Carr, 27 February 1826, Carr-Cary Papers, University of Virginia Library; Jefferson to T. J. Randolph, 8 February 1826, in The Family Letters of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Betts and Bear, 469-70.

(70) Jefferson, "Thoughts o­n Lotteries," February 1826, in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Albert Ellery Bergh, vol. 17 (Washington, D.C., 1907), 448-65.

(71) Hetty Carr to D. Carr, 13 March 1826, Carr-Cary Papers, University of Virginia Library.

(72) H. Carr to D. Carr, 10 March 1826, Carr-Cary Papers, University of Virginia Library.

(73) H. Carr to D. Carr, 13 March 1826, Carr-Cary Papers, University of Virginia Library; H. Carr to D. Carr, 29 March 1826, Carr-Cary Papers, University of Virginia Library.

(74) Sloan, Principle and Interest, 221-23; see also Acts Passed at a General Assembly of the Commonwealth of Virginia (Richmond, 1826), 101-2; Nathaniel Richardson and Joseph H. Thayer, Letter of May 23 1826 to the Citizens of Boston: A SOLICITATION (Boston, 1826); List of Subscribers for Relief of Thomas Jefferson from Debt, May 1, 1826 [New York, 1826], with handwritten additions, Jefferson Papers, University of Virginia Library.

(75) Jefferson to Madison, 17 February 1826, in The Republic of Letters, ed. Smith, vol. 3, 1964-67.

(76) Remarks of Dr. Robley Dunglison, in Randall, The Life of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 3, 549.

(77) Smith, The First Forty Years of Washington Society, 397; see also Mayer, The Constitutional Thought of Thomas Jefferson, 320-24.

(78) Smith, The First Forty Years of Washington Society, 58-59; see also Gordon S. Wood, "Interests and Disinterestedness in the Making of the Constitution," in Beyond Confederation: Origins of the Constitution and American National Identity, ed. Richard Beeman et al. (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1987), 82-93; Paul K. Longmore, The Invention of George Washington (Berkeley, 1988), 173, 297 n. 25; Barry Schwartz, George Washington: The Making of an American Symbol (New York, 1987), 122, 137; Garry Wills, Cincinnatus: George Washington and the Enlightenment (Garden City, N.Y., 1984).

(79) Jefferson to George Rogers Clark, 25 December 1780, in The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Boyd et al., vol. 4, 237-38; see also Julian P. Boyd, "Thomas Jefferson's `Empire of Liberty'" Virginia Quarterly Review 24 (1948): 538-54, esp. 547-48; Malone, Jefferson and His Time, vol. 4, 317; Merrill D. Peterson, Thomas Jefferson and the New Nation (New York, 1970), 772-73; Robert W. Tucker and David C. Hendrickson, Empire of Liberty. The Statecraft of Thomas Jefferson (New York, 1990), 161-63.

(80) Charles Francis Adams, ed., Memoirs of John Quincy Adams, Comprising Portions of His Diary from 1795 to 1848, vol. 7 (Philadelphia, 1875), 133.

Robert M. S. McDonald is an assistant professor at the United States Military Academy.

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Actors portraying Sally Hemmings and Thomas Jefferson