Twilight at Monticello: The Final Years of Thomas Jefferson
352Twilight at Monticello: The Final Years of Thomas Jefferson
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Overview
Though physical illness and family troubles, Jefferson remained a viable political force, receiving dignitaries and corresponding with close friends, including John Adams and other heroes from the Revolution; helping his neighbor James Madison during his presidency; and establishing the University of Virginia. It was also during these years that Jefferson’s idealism would be most severely, and heartbreakingly, tested.
Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9780812969467 |
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Publisher: | Random House Publishing Group |
Publication date: | 02/10/2009 |
Edition description: | Reprint |
Pages: | 352 |
Product dimensions: | 5.20(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.90(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Twilight at Monticello
The Final Years of Thomas JeffersonBy Alan Pell Crawford
Random House
Copyright © 2008 Alan Pell CrawfordAll right reserved.
ISBN: 9781400060795
Part One
Morning and Midday
Chapter 1
A Society of Would-be Country Squires
The Virginia Piedmont, to which Thomas Jefferson returned upon his retirement from the presidency early in 1809, had not changed much since his birth there on April 13, 1743. Jefferson was born at his father’s tobacco plantation, Shadwell, on the Rivanna River, which flows through a gap in a small range called the Southwest Mountains. A few miles west of Shadwell, on the far side of the Southwest Mountains, the town of Charlottesville would be established. Just past Charlottesville stood the Blue Ridge Mountains, beyond which lay the Shenandoah Valley, walled off by the more imposing Alleghenies. On the other side of the Alleghenies stretched the great American West.
This was rugged territory in 1734, when Peter Jefferson received his first land grant in what would become Albemarle County, and it would remain rugged for decades to come. As late as the American Revolution, a halfcentury after Shadwell was built, Albemarle was a “dreary region of woods and wretchedness,” in the words of Thomas Anburey, a British officer held prisoner near Monticello but, as a gentleman, given considerable freedom ofmovement. Wild horses roamed at will, “and have no proprietors, but those on whose lands they are found,” Anburey observed. Hogs ran wild, and packs of wolves preyed on the deer as well as on any sheep the planters kept. Even in Jefferson’s time, a Monticello slave would recall, “you could see the wolves in gangs runnin’ and howlin’, same as a drove of hogs.” The Indians that had once lived there and left traces of their existence—an abandoned burial mound stood on Peter Jefferson’s property—had moved south and west or vanished altogether by the time the Englishmen began to build their houses.
The countryside where Peter Jefferson established his family was unlike that of the Virginia Tidewater, where wide and deep rivers—the James, Potomac, York, Rappahannock, and Appomattox—cut through vast expanses of fertile flatlands. Forty or fifty miles west of Richmond, as the Blue Ridge comes into view, the land becomes hilly; the valleys between the hills are cobwebbed with creeks, a geography that presented a greater agricultural challenge than the planters of the Tidewater were accustomed to, as Peter Jefferson and other settlers would soon discover.
These settlers, unlike the Jeffersons, were not all of English derivation. There were also scores of Scots-Irish and Germans who had come down from Pennsylvania through the Shenandoah Valley. These were farmers who made tidy livings from small but well-tended plots of ground, as John Hammond Moore has written in his history of Albemarle County, “doing their own work, with the help of sons, relatives, and hired hands.” Having never depended upon slaves to labor for them, these hardworking men (and women) either had little patience for the pretensions of the lordly slaveholders—or were intimidated by them.
Two years after Thomas Jefferson’s birth, when the first list of Albemarle County “tithables,” or white males eighteen and older, was compiled, there were only 1,394 taxpayers in the entire county. The total population of Albemarle—male and female, young and old, white and black, was about 4,250. About half of the people of Albemarle were enslaved, many just brought over from Africa.
The smallest group, though they wielded by far the greatest influence, were the self-styled gentlemen who had come from the East, bringing their slaves, their liquor, and sometimes their libraries. The most influential of the English settlers were the Jeffersons and the future president’s maternal relatives, the Randolphs.
To clear Albemarle’s hilly land and grow crops on it proved challenging to all the settlers, lowborn and high. Much of this land, cut deep with gullies, bristled with the stumps and lifeless trunks of trees that had been killed rather than chopped down. To save time and trouble, the settlers merely hacked off a strip of bark all around the trunk, leaving the tree to wither and die, usually within a couple of years. Although trees might put out a spindly growth of leaves the next season, Anburey wrote, they would soon stand skeletal and bare against the sky, giving the landscape a “very singular, striking, and dreadful appearance.” Eventually, the rotting trees toppled over “with a most horrible crash,” but until they fell, farming went on as if they were not there at all. The underbrush was either burned away or dug out with hoes. The soil “was scratched with plows,” according to Anburey, “and the first crop was planted under the canopy of dead branches.”
A Virginia farm field “should seem dangerous to walk in . . . for the trees are of a prodigious magnitude and height, from which are impending in awful ruins vast limbs, and branches of an enormous size, which are continually breaking off.” The fences that enclosed these farmlands and kept livestock from wandering off were constructed in a zigzag arrangement so haphazard that New Englanders made a joke of it: when a man was drunk, they would say he was “making Virginia fences.”
Very little of the acreage to which the planters held title was under cultivation at any one time, and farming anywhere except in the bottomlands along the river proved arduous. When tobacco was ready for transport, farmers rolled their hogsheads to the riverbanks and waited until a “freshet” swelled the streams, which enabled them to get their crops to the Tidewater on canoes and batteaux.
After such a storm, Anburey noted, the waters rolled down from the mountains, overflowed the banks for miles on end, and washed away the earth, “which being of a red cast, appeared like a torrent of blood.” When the water was high, boats could move all the way to Richmond. For much of the year, however, the Rivanna, being either iced over in winter or too shallow in summer, was not navigable at all.
Virginia farmers relied on fires as well as floods. In the spring and fall, planters eager to rid their fields of weeds, fallen leaves, and stubble set fires “which traverse whole counties,” Thomas Jefferson wrote in his book Notes on the State of Virginia. Fires “are very frequent,” Anburey reported, “and at Charlottesville I have seen the mountains on a blaze for three or four miles in length.”
The fields were plowed “not more than two inches deep,” in Jeff Randolph’s words, and the few nutrients left in the soil after tobacco, wheat, and corn had been grown on a given field were washed away by the same thundershowers that allowed farmers to get their crops to market. This erosion contributed to the soil’s depletion with astonishing speed. Eventually, entire fields were “abandoned to gullies[,] broom, and briers,” Randolph observed. By 1804, “nine tenths of the cleared land in [the area around Shadwell and Monticello] was in this condition,” its owners “having sold it at low rates and moved west.”
Most Virginians, black and white, lived in cabins or shacks, but here and there, on the hills overlooking the Rivanna, stood crude manor houses that their builders called mansions, surrounded by unpainted wooden outbuildings, stables, and slave quarters. These plantations were, for the most part, self- contained, self-supporting communities and the closest approximations of towns or cities for miles around.
Travel between these plantations and to the towns back east—sixty miles east to Richmond, say, or a hundred forty to Williamsburg—could be perilous. The dirt roads and carriage trails that connected the plantations were often impassable. Finished goods, like crops, moved mostly by boat. So, quite often, did the settlers. Whether they went by boat or made their way along the crude roads, people traveling to visit neighbors frequently found themselves facing vast clouds of black smoke from the farmers’ fires.
Because Virginians lived at such distances from one another, they took every opportunity to socialize. They endured considerable hardship to attend barbecues, fish fries, and horse races, and at all of these events drunkenness was commonplace. The society into which Thomas Jefferson was born aspired to gentility but rarely achieved it. Taverns predated houses of worship, which, although established by the Church of England, were attended but grudgingly by the colonials they had been built to serve.
Under English common law, which prevailed through the colonial period, Virginians could be fined for missing church once, flogged for a second infraction, and put to death for a third. Until Thomas Jefferson, as a member of the Virginia legislature, recommended revisions to the penal code, “free-thinkers” could find their children taken away. During Jefferson’s childhood such laws, though rarely, if ever, enforced, remained on the books.
This was not a pious culture, nor an especially law-abiding one, but it was convivial. As soon as work was done, when holidays rolled around, or when there was business to attend to at the courthouse, the leading men of the county entertained themselves in raucous fashion, playing cards, dice, and billiards, often for high stakes. Violence often followed, “it not being the fashion of the day,” in Jeff Randolph’s words, “for men to restrain their tempers.”
In 1748, five years after Jefferson’s birth, fighting had gotten so vicious that Virginia’s colonial legislature passed a general statute against maiming, making it a felony to cut out another person’s tongue, put out his eye, or bite his nose or lip; thirty years later, just before the Revolution, the lawmakers added a prohibition against “gouging, plucking or putting out an eye, biting, kicking or stomping upon” a fellow subject of the British crown.
At horse races, competition was often restricted “to the better sort of Virginians only,” Anburey found, and the planters, serving as their own jockeys, were uninhibited in the use of the whip, which they applied to one another as readily as to their mounts. Fox hunting, though viewed in some Tidewater circles as vulgar, remained popular in the Piedmont, where the sportsmen not only chased their prey with the help of dogs but shot at it as well. These would-be country squires seldom turned their weapons on one another, and murder was rare. Dueling, however, was an accepted practice, associated with an aristocratic way of life that ambitious English settlers were determined to transplant in the New World.
Continues...
Excerpted from Twilight at Monticello by Alan Pell Crawford Copyright © 2008 by Alan Pell Crawford. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Prologue "I Shall Be for Ever at Ease" xiii
Part 1 Morning and Midday
Chapter 1 A Society of Would-be Country Squires 3
Chapter 2 An Upcountry Prince 8
Chapter 3 The Education of a Philosopher 14
Chapter 4 The Young Revolutionary 17
Chapter 5 The Crucible of Revolution 20
Chapter 6 "Whence He Might Contemplate the Whole Universe" 24
Chapter 7 "The Hated Occupations of Politics" 26
Chapter 8 The Revolutionary Takes Command 33
Chapter 9 "In a State of Almost Total Incapacity" 41
Part 2 Late Afternoon and Sunset
Chapter 10 "A Prisoner Released from His Chains" 55
Chapter 11 "Elevated Above the Mass of Mankind" 63
Chapter 12 "When I Expect to Settle my Grandchildren" 70
Chapter 13 "The Shock of an Earthquake" 78
Chapter 14 Old Friends Reunited 83
Chapter 15 At War Again 91
Chapter 16 "This Enterprise Is for the Young" 98
Chapter 17 "When I Reflect That God Is Just" 105
Chapter 18 A Library for "the American Statesman" 110
Chapter 19 Jeff Randolph Takes a Wife 113
Chapter 20 The Realm of "Sobriety and Cool Reason" 117
Chapter 21 "To Witness the Death of All Our Companions" 123
Chapter 22 "The Eternal Preservation of Republican Principles" 128
Chapter 23 The Indulgent Patriarch 134
Chapter 24 The "Yellow Children" of the Mountaintop 139
Chapter 25 "Something Very Great and Very New" 150
Chapter 26 Struggling "All Our Lives with Debt & Difficulty" 157
Chapter 27 Blood in the Streets of Charlottesville 164
Chapter 28 Fire, Sickness, Drought, and Storm 170
Chapter 29 A Philosophe's Faith 182
Chapter 30 "We Shall Have Every Religious Man in Virginia Against Us" 190
Chapter 31 The Death Knell of the Union 194
Chapter 32 The "HideousEvil" of Slavery 197
Chapter 33 "Ah, Jefferson!" "Ah, Lafayette!" 201
Chapter 34 "More Than Patience Could Endure" 208
Chapter 35 "Take Care of Me When Dead " 213
Chapter 36 "An Inspiration from the Realms of Bliss" 223
Chapter 37 "I Have Given My Whole Life to My Country" 227
Chapter 38 "Is It the Fourth?" 234
Epilogue 247
Acknowledgments 265
Notes 267
Index 311
Illustration Credits 321
What People are Saying About This
"A breath of fresh air in the vast collection of Jeffersonian biographies.... Narrator James Boles convincingly presents the bleak drudgery of life at Monticello." -AudioFile