Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power (45 page)

FORTY

MY BODY, MIND, AND AFFAIRS

Amidst the din of war and the wreck of nations his wisdom has hitherto secured our peace; his eminent public services are engraved on the hearts of his children.

—Toast to Thomas Jefferson at Tammany Society of Washington on May 12, 1809

I
N
HIS
ROOMS
at Monticello, Jefferson slept facing east on a bed built into an alcove between his working study (which was often called his “cabinet”) and a chamber anchored by a fireplace. Red bed curtains hung on each side of the bed. Though the rooms were peaceful, Jefferson was reminded of the passing of time by both sight and sound whenever he rested his head on his pillow. A 1790 clock mounted between two obelisks rested on a wooden shelf inside his sleeping alcove; with a delicate ting, it chimed the hour and the half hour. Below the clock hung a sword—the gift, it was said, of “a long forgotten Arabian prince.” And there were the sounds of Jefferson's ubiquitous mockingbirds.

Overnight the silence of the chamber was also broken second by second by a tall-case clock placed along the western wall of the study. The tick-tick-tick of the tall clock was constant, growing louder as the house grew quieter through the hours of darkness. When the three doors connecting Jefferson's rooms to the rest of the house were closed, they formed a surprisingly effective barrier between the master and the household. Four tall windows flanked the sleeping Jefferson in the study to his right; a single window lit the bedroom with the fireplace to his left, a room where he kept his wife's walnut dressing table.

Jefferson had his own privy just steps away from his bed alcove, one of three in the house proper. He used pieces of scrap paper for hygiene purposes. (Examples were collected from his privy by a family member on the day of Jefferson's death and now survive in the Library of Congress.)

He generally got five to eight hours of sleep a night, always reading for half an hour or an hour before bedtime, using eyeglasses. As he grew older he had difficulty hearing different voices speaking at the same time. He enjoyed good health, suffering from extremely rare fevers. The headaches that had plagued him in times of stress seemed “now to have left me” once he was free of the clamor of office.

His chambers were in the sun's direct path. Much of his first sense of light would have come from his right, from the first easterly window in the cabinet. If he awoke, as he said he did, at early sunrise, when the hands of the obelisk clock grew visible, then there would have been a steadily rising tide of light that began as a trickle but soon came to fill the room.

Jefferson would have sat up in his alcove and turned to his left to plunge his feet into his morning basin of cold water. There he would stay for a time, looking at the fireplace and intuitively tracking the rise of the sun by the amount of light coming through the bedroom skylight.

He and his Monticello were a little like the sun itself: at the center of the universe.

T
he eleven-thousand-square-foot, thirty-three-room house (there are ten other rooms in the pavilions and under the South Terrace) in which he woke up every morning was his joy, and it was only in the years after he retired from the presidency that it was exactly as he wished it to be.

Walking into the entrance hall by the glass front door on the East Front of Monticello, Jefferson, his family, and his guests were immediately immersed in the work of his life. Artifacts and emblems of America's natural and political worlds hung in the great hall; the floor was green (at the suggestion of Gilbert Stuart), the walls whitewashed with a yellow-orange dado below the chair rail. There were the antlers of moose and elk, the upper jawbone of a mastodon, and forty Indian objects, including carved stone sculptures, tools, a Mandan buffalo robe, and a small portrait of a young Sack chief. There were maps, including the Fry-Jefferson map of Virginia, drawn by his father so long before, and later ones of North America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. There was a scale model of the Pyramid of Cheops.

There was a sculpture,
Ariadne,
which Jefferson long mistook for one of Cleopatra before realizing the work was a depiction of the tragic mythological heroine. There were the paintings
St. Jerome in Meditation
and
Jesus in the Praetorium,
which Jefferson described in detail: “Jesus … stripped of the purple, as yet naked, and with the crown of thorns on his head. He is sitting.… The persons present seem to be one of his revilers, one of his followers, and the superintendent of the execution. The subject from Mark 15:16–20.” There were portraits of Americus Vespucius, John Adams, and of Jefferson himself (by Gilbert Stuart), two engravings of the Declaration of Independence—one of John Trumbull's depiction of the signing, the other of the document itself—and busts of Hamilton, Voltaire, and Turgot, the French politician and economist.

There was method to the decoration of Monticello. For Jefferson, the portraits, busts, statues, and artifacts in the house were not a random collection but rather “memorials of those worthies whose remembrance I feel a pride and comfort in consecrating there.” Anything—or anyone—represented within Monticello was meaningful to Jefferson in some way and to some degree.

Only steps into the house, then, the range of Jefferson's mind and heart, the universal nature of his interests and his sense of the sweep of history, were manifest to every eye. The fossils and antlers, the Indian artifacts, and the maps represented the primeval American world and the white man's first attempts to project power over the land. The pyramid and Ariadne were refugees from the ancient world. The paintings of St. Jerome and of Jesus in the moments before the crucifixion commemorated the vast and inarguable role of religion in the history of western civilization. Vespucius—and Columbus, whose portrait hung in the next room, the parlor—carried the story across the Atlantic to the New World. Voltaire and Turgot represented the work of the philosophes of the Enlightenment. Adams, Hamilton, Jefferson himself, and the Continental Congress in declaring independence from Britain brought the tale forward into the recent past, into the work of the master of the house's lifetime.

And so it goes, room after room, object after object, engraving after engraving, painting after painting, medallion after medallion throughout Monticello.

To reach the parlor, guests moved beneath the tall ceiling decorated with a plaster relief of an eagle surrounded by stars, across the floor, and under a brass Argand-style lamp and a balcony to cross onto a beautiful floor of cherry and beech—a parquet pattern Jefferson personally designed.

Like the hall, the parlor is eighteen feet, two inches high, and decorated with a Corinthian frieze from the Temple of Jupiter the Thunderer. Here Jefferson crafted a room of tiered artwork surrounding card tables, chairs, sofas, a chess set, a harpsichord, and a pianoforte—a room in which the present life of the house and of the family unfolded in the midst of emblems of the past that had made its owner, and its owner's nation, possible. “Portraits—24; Paintings—17; Medals—10; Busts—2; Miscellaneous—4,” Jefferson wrote, cataloging the parlor's decorations.

Here hung paintings and here sat sculptures of the makers of the age—and of the ages: George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Magellan, Napoleon, Lafayette, Columbus, Vespucius, Alexander I, David Rittenhouse, Sir Walter Raleigh, James Madison, Thomas Paine, James Monroe, Louis XVI, John Locke, Sir Isaac Newton, Francis Bacon, Adams, and Jefferson himself both by Trumbull and by Mather Brown. There was an elegant Charles Willson Peale portrait of Jefferson's grandson Thomas Jefferson Randolph and a medallion of Edward Preble, who triumphed at Tripoli in 1804. As in the hall, there were religious images, too:
The Penitent Magdalen,
Descent from the Cross,
and
Herodias Bearing the Head of St. John the Baptist
. Two small S
è
vres figures—
Venus with Cupid
and
Hope with Cupid
—evoked the ancient world.

The brilliantly yellow dining room sits to the right. Through it, separated by double pocket doors on rollers, is the small octagonal tea room. There, Jefferson and his family would eat and converse in what he called his “most honorable suite,” glancing up at busts of Washington, Franklin, Lafayette, and John Paul Jones, all by Jean-Antoine Houdon.

Patsy had a blue sitting room near her father's private rooms, called the South Square Room, and there was a North Octagonal Room with an alcove bed often used by Dolley and James Madison when they visited.

The upstairs—including the beautiful Dome Room atop the house—was a series of small bedrooms. The center of the house, and the center of life, was downstairs, where Jefferson presided.

I
f it had not been called Monticello,” a visitor wrote in 1816, “I would call it Olympus, and Jove its occupant.” Jefferson's family agreed. His “cheerfulness and affection,” a granddaughter recalled, “were the warm sun in which his family all basked and were invigorated.”

He was like a “patriarch of old,” as he put it in a letter to Maria Cosway. “Our mother educated all her children to look up to her father, as she looked up to him herself—literally looked up, as to one standing on an eminence of greatness and goodness,” wrote a granddaughter, Ellen Coolidge. “And it is no small proof of his real elevation that, as we grew older and better able to judge for ourselves, we were more and more confirmed in the opinions we had formed of it.”

His grandchildren loved him and revered him. They followed him on garden walks (never, though, putting a foot on a garden bed, for that “would violate one of his rules”). He never had to raise his voice: Their sense of his authority was so complete that it was unnecessary for him to “utter a harsh word to one of us, or speak in a raised tone of voice, or use a threat,” a granddaughter recalled. “He simply said, ‘do,' or ‘do not.' ” And that was that.

He picked fruit for them—usually figs and cherries—with a long stick topped with a hook and net bag, and he organized and presided over races on the grounds. The course was the terrace or around the lawn. Jefferson gave head starts according to ages, and the contestants took off when he dropped his white handkerchief from his outstretched right hand. Awards were three figs, prunes, or dates for the winner; two for second place; and one for third. On some summer nights he had a chess table of his own design—it had been made by John Hemings—set up outside for matches with a granddaughter.

In the wintertime, when the days were short, Jefferson would sit with his family before a fire in the late afternoon. This was the hour, a granddaughter said, “when it grew too dark to read,” and so “in the half hour before candles came in, as we all sat round the fire, he taught us several childish games, and would play them with us.” There was “Cross Questions and Crooked Answers,” a whispering circle game, and “I Love My Love with A,” a pastime in which successive players had to come up with attributes throughout the alphabet.

The arrival of candles signaled an end to games and a resumption of reading. Everything fell quiet as Jefferson “took up his book to read, and we would not speak out of a whisper lest we should disturb him, and generally we followed his example and took a book—and I have seen him raise his eyes from his own book and look round on the little circle of readers, and smile and make some remark to mamma about it.”

Despite the privacy of his rooms—a result of his own planning—he did not like being alone for any great length of time. To preserve the privacy of his rooms, he had constructed Venetian porches, or “porticles,” with blinds that shielded the visibility of his quarters from outside the main house. Once, when he was snowed in at Poplar Forest, he wrote Patsy: “I am like a state prisoner. My keepers set before me at fixed hours something to eat and withdraw.”

His command was total, his love enveloping. On journeys to Bedford he took care to wrap his family in capes, and, if needed, furs. He sang and conversed the whole way and served picnic lunches of cold meat and wine mixed with water.

He once overheard a young granddaughter lament that she had never had a silk dress. One arrived for her from Charlottesville the next day. On another occasion a granddaughter tore a beloved muslin dress on the glass door connecting the hall to the portico. “Grand-papa was standing by and saw the disaster,” the granddaughter recalled. Several days later the former president of the United States came into Patsy's sitting room adjacent to his own apartment, “a bundle in his hand.” To his granddaughter he said, “I have been mending your dress for you.” It was a new frock.

He might hear a child express a wish for a watch, or for a saddle and bridle, or for a guitar, and would quietly provide them (doing so with borrowed money). He made sure his grandchildren were given Bibles and Shakespeare and writing tables. “Our grandfather seemed to read our hearts, to see our invisible wishes, to be our good genius, to wave the fairy wand, to brighten our young lives by his goodness and his gifts.”

His sense of the needs of others was part of his nature—a nature, one granddaughter said, “so eminently sympathetic, that with those he loved, he could enter into their feelings, anticipate their wishes, gratify their tastes, and surround them with an atmosphere of affection.” A patriarch's love is rather like a politician's skill. Both are about perceiving what others want, and trying, within reason, to provide it. That had been the work of Jefferson's public life and now, in retirement, it was that of his personal life, too.

T
he good cheer Margaret Bayard Smith had noted in Jefferson at Madison's inauguration remained evident in the first months of his return to Virginia. “Mr. Jefferson called last week, and dined here yesterday,” Elizabeth Trist wrote a friend from Farmington in April 1809. “I never saw him look better nor appear so happy.”