The Thomas Jefferson Hour; Biography

The New Thomas Jefferson Hour is produced by High Plains Public Radio and New Enlightenment Radio Network, a non-profit organization dedicated to the search for truth in the tradition of Thomas Jefferson. Welcome to the New Thomas Jefferson Hour, a weekly conversation with the third president of the United States. Please join us as our host Bill Crystal speaks with Thomas Jefferson, portrayed by humanity's scholar Clay Jenkinson. Welcome to the Thomas Jefferson Hour, your weekly conversation with the third president of the United States. Today is one of the final in our series of Jefferson biographies. We're going to look at Mr. Jefferson after he left the presidency. This series includes all of his life and there will be a final episode that is going to come as a complete surprise to our listeners, but until that final episode, let's take a look, Mr. Jefferson, at what happens to you when you leave Washington. Now for some presidents, that's a very difficult thing to do.

Some presidents have a hard time leaving Washington. One of them stayed up all night long. He was so remiss to surrender his office. Did you spend each and every night staying up, pardoning people to all hours and the hopes that it would go on forever? I didn't spend the last hours of my presidency pardoning anybody. I believed that when it was clear that I would not stand for a third term, and this was really a decision that I made shortly after the election of 184, that it would be a mistake for me to make any decisions late in 188 or early in 189. Keep in mind that the inauguration in my era occurred in March, in January, so the transition is longer in my time than it is in yours. The results of the election of 1808 would have been known in November or early December. Then I was still president from that period all the way till March 4th, 189, and I certainly did nothing during that period that within any way constrained my successor, James Madison.

I felt that once the choice of the people had been made known through the election, that he would be the fourth president of the United States, my duty was to... maintain the continuity of our government, of course, to do the routine daily things that have to be done, to attend to correspondence, to make sure that our international relations remain on a steady basis. But to make no decisions of a lasting impact, I wanted to leave all of that to Mr. Madison. Well, it helps that he was your hand-picked successor, Mr. Jefferson, had... You've been in the position that John Adams was in. For example, if you were going to find yourself replaced by someone whose philosophy was radically different from your own, would you have taken that same posture? I don't think so. There would have been intense pressure for me to do that, to do what Adams did, which is to pack the courts and to do everything I could to get decisions made in Congress and in the executive branch that would further the causes that I stood for.

In other words, Adams in the last hours of his administration packed the courts with known Federalist people, who were my enemies, people who distrusted me, people who were determined to keep what I call the Second American Revolution from coming to pass. If I had been a lame duck president in that same way, if the Federalist would be replacing me in 189, I would have been under pressure from the radical Republicans to do similar things. But I think I would have resisted it. First of all, I was so hurt by John Adams' actions as a lame duck president between December of 1800 and March of 181, that I never really came to terms with that. I later said in a letter to Mrs. Adams that there was one thing of her husband's behavior and one thing only that really wrangled my spirit and it was his midnight appointments. So that was a memory that I still hung on to in 1888 and 1889, and I doubt that I would have done to anybody what he had done to me.

I feel that that was ungentlemanly, and it's also, I think, a constitutional mistake. It's not a legal constitutional mistake, but it's a moral constitutional mistake. The people have spoken. The people have spoken fatically in the election of 1800 that they wanted the Federalist to retire to private life, and I think at that point any gentleman who has a reverence for the Constitution would say, fair enough, I don't have to like what the people have done, but I must respect what the people have done. And so you were able to walk away from your second term as President of the United States and not look back. You didn't write Mr. Madison routinely and suggest that he do this or that. Well, for a few months, I gave him some advice and then I ceased. For one thing, he made it clear that he was going to follow an independent path. You know, clearly he was going to be a Jeffersonian. He was going to remain in the Republican fold. He was a man. He was my closest friend in the world. We had virtually identical views of things, but he was an independent man with his own sense of pride, and he did not want to be my protégé as President.

But I also, I didn't stay up during the last weeks of my administration trying to get the most out of being President. I was tired and ready to go home really years before I retired in March of 1899. And if I lost any sleep, it was because I couldn't wait to get back to the gardens at Monticello and my grandchildren and my beloved daughter, Martha. Well, tell us about Mr. Madison's inauguration. Was it markedly different from your own, sir? Well, it was a little more formal than mine. He's not as populist in his style as I was. You know, his wife called him the Great Little Madison. He was a doer, a little fellow dressed in black. He was as timid as a canary at his inauguration. I was a modest man, but he was a terrified man. And I remember not so much the inauguration, which was a peaceful transfer of power of the most genial sword. And you were actually there unlike your predecessor.

Indeed, I did not snub my successor. The way Adams had snubbed me by leaving town at dawn on the public stage to avoid having to watch the enemy come to power as the President of the United States. I was there, of course, and it was a lovely quiet, unostentatious sort of ceremony. But what I remember mostly is the inaugural ball. I didn't have one in 181, but Madison did have an inaugural ball. And I went there and one of the women of the society sat in Washington came up to me and said, why is it Mr. Jefferson that you're grinning and Madison looks so unhappy? And I said, because I'm out, and he's in, and he has to face at least four and probably eight years of the splendid misery of being the President of the United States. And I'm looking forward in a few days to packing up everything and going back to Monticello and I intend to spend the rest of my life in my garden. And so I was as cheerful as can be.

I didn't dance. I'm not much of a believer in dancing after a certain age in one's life, but I stood on folding my arms with cheerful benevolence so confident that the country was now on the right track because Madison, the author of the Bill of Rights and the father of the Constitution was the President. And your protégé so that if you really thought that he ought to do something, at least for a few months, you believed that you would be able to get him to do it. Well, you know, I didn't work, I never wrote a letter saying I wish you would do X or Y. That's not my style. My style is to wait for Madison to come to Monticello and as we're strolling through the gardens or the fields to say, no, on that tariff issue, I wonder what you're thinking is. And then in a kind of secratic way, leading him until he believes that he's made the decision that I most wanted him to make, but I'm not one to tell other people what to do under any circumstance. That's not my style. And I don't think that it's a good political strategy. But it was clear. I mean, our view is overlapped 99.9% of the time and when they didn't, there was room for open-minded dialogue on both sides.

And I must tell you, I tended to defer to Madison all of my life. I used him as my, as my barometer. If he said that something that I was espousing was impracticable or likely to miscarry or to be misunderstood or misconstrued, I almost invariably backed down. He was my veto. It was a power that I gave to Madison and Madison alone. I would never have given this power to Monroe, for example. But to Madison, I granted tacitly, we never talked about this. The capacity to tell me I was wrong or to suggest that even if I was right, the timing was off or there was some other reason why I should not go forward with some special favorite plan of mine. So he had a unique power in my life and so far from telling him what to do, it was more often that he would tell me what to do. So the country was in good hands, Mr. Jefferson, you packed all of your belongings and headed

back to Virginia. What was it your hope that you would be able to do in retirement that you had not been able to do while you were president? Well, Finnish Monticello and Finnish Poplar Forest, you know, Monticello was 40 years in the making and I had put it up and plucked it down and by the time some parts of it were finished, other parts were in decay and it was one of those ongoing projects in domestic architecture that consumed a great deal of time and a great deal of money and never really was completed in the simple sense of the term. So I knew that I had building to do at Monticello and a great deal of it and then I had begun in 186 during my second term to create a house for myself in my other estate down in Bedford County, Poplar Forest. This is in a state that I had inherited from my wife Martha, it had been in her family and I had farms there in fact my most productive and profitable farms were at Lynchburg at Bedford County rather than in Aubermarle and I used to have to go there from the 1780s on a couple

of times a year to supervise you know to make sure that the farms were efficiently supervised by the overseers and I'd stay in the overseers' huts I thought perhaps I'll build a house there for myself. How old were you Mr. Jefferson when you actually retired from the presidency? Well I entered the presidency of 58 so 8 years later you know I'm 66 or 67 years old. By your time you were an elderly man. Oh and I knew it you know when I stood first for the presidency in 1800 I actually believe that I might be too old I entered at 57 just under 58 and I was still in perfect health then and I knew better health than most people of my generation my health didn't really begin to be seriously challenged until later up till that point up till 189 I had suffered from some broken limbs I'd broken my wrist a couple of times once during the dark period

just after my governorship of Virginia and then again in an unfortunate incident of romance let's call it involving Mrs. Cosway in France in 1786 so I'd broken my wrist and dislocated it. Oh it was a matter of head, heart and hand as a Freudian slip and so I'd had a couple of bouts of that and I had some digestive problems I hate to talk about this but while I was first being president of the United States I had serious digestive troubles essentially diarrhea and I felt that it would shorten my life and I wrote to Dr. Rush and other friends of mine asking for advice and they suggested changes in diet and so on and so forth. You got no thunder blasters? No thunder clappers from Dr. Rush I don't believe in emetics and cathartics but eventually I solved the problem by riding my horses vigorously around Washington DC that seemed to be the best

but in your time this would probably be diagnosed as irritable bowel syndrome that comes from high stress and there's a great deal of stress in being the president of the United States because even in a three mile per hour world. Indeed because six million people have put me in that chair and I owe it to them to administer the country frugally and intelligently and to keep us in peace if possible and to be fair-minded and to make decisions that they will honor and yet sometimes to thwart the will of the people somewhat when I think that they're not as well informed on some issue as they might be or whether I might think that a sectional dispute between Virginia, my home state, which I adore and New England needs to be settled in some nonpartisan, nonsectional way. So the stress is someone's always upset, someone's ox is always gourd, the radical Republicans were pushing me to undo Mr. Hamilton's entire system. The moderate Republicans were urging me to tamper as little as possible with the Hamiltonian program and the Hamiltonians.

The Federalist would cry foul if I did anything that seemed to deny their infinite wisdom. So I was, you know, your caught as president and the stresses are really great. There are work stresses. I was working 14, 15, 16 hour days as president. Then there are the stresses of politics per se, all politicians and statesmen know these stresses and then there are the stresses that I particularly felt as someone deeply committed to being the people's leader, to really, for the first time maybe in human history, being a national leader who was deeply attached to the dignity and the will of the people and not some sort of benevolent dictator like Catherine the Great or Frederick. So all those stresses, and I suppose that would be called the New York Times irritable bowel syndrome. I overcame them and then the other malady that I had known up until 189 were migraines. I suffered from severe migraines all of my life, sometimes so severe that I would have to go into a room at dawn, dark, all the blinds

shut and sit quietly and not say a word, not read a book which was excursiating for me, not write a letter, not work on a scientific gadget, just sit there quietly or lie down for an entire day, dawn till sunset, and for weeks on end. And that ceased after you left the presidency? Yes, everything ceased, you know, the sense of liberation. I think I said in a letter just at that point when I retired, never has a prisoner released from his chains felt more relief than I do. I had no more desire to govern men than to ride my horse through a snowstorm. I don't know why anybody would want to govern men. Men should govern themselves. We want limited government, we want government to do those few things that government alone can do, national defense for example, and leave to the people the initiative to govern their own lives. So this is, I never understood why anybody would want to be the president. Well, you may have given us the best

reason, Mr. Jefferson, when you suggested it, it might have something to do with rottenness of character. It is rottenness of character. You know, what happens is that my own party was so triumphant in the election of 184 that the Federalist virtually disappeared from the earth. And I began to feel some concern at that because it helps to have an enemy. You know, once the enemy's gone, then the Republican party would start to show factionalism and the radical Republicans would be appalled by the moderate Republicans. And I think I hate to say this because it, in a sense, it enforces a John Adams view of life, or worse, a Hamiltonian view of life, but I do believe there is factionalism built into the human character. And that if there's not an enemy to fight with, then we fight with our friends. And so I hope the Federalists would do a little better so that we could make them our bogey and caricature them as the anti-Christ and vent all of our vitriol and our political anger and aggression towards them. But the triumph of my party, and I suppose

you'd call it the triumph of the people, was so great that the Federalist virtually went extinct. So I do think a rottenness of character creeps in. And I don't think it crept much into me because I had several reasons. First of all, I had no bless oblige. I was, I mean, I say this in retrospect, I would not have admitted this in my lifetime. But I was an aristocrat governing a democratic culture. And so I didn't feel the same deep concern about what it said about my character or winning every political battle that I might have felt if I had been born as a more average citizen. Well, you know, when you're born in aristocrat and when life is essentially a golden event for you in many regards, you can afford to be generous about the little world of politics in a way that you wouldn't be if you were from a more grasping background like Patrick Henry. So there was no bless oblige. I also was very deeply ideologically

committed to democracy. And so I didn't take myself as seriously as some others have done. And I didn't want to be the president. And so the fact that I was in a way, a president against his better judgment allowed me to stay above the fray more than, say, Andrew Jackson would have done or John Quincy Adams. So I was I was detached in a certain way. And I made it my lifelong principle. And I think this is the most important thing that I can say today. I made it my lifelong principle always to be on the side of the people. If you stay with the people, not slavishly, but but fundamentally, you will always do well because the people are sovereign. And as Rousseau put it so paradoxically, the people are always right even when they're wrong. And so the great statesman is the one with a genuine, pervasive, unambiguous, and faithful commitment to the will of the people. And if you stay with them, they will reward you. And at that point, we can leave the

presidency behind, Mr. Jefferson. I left on March 11th, 189 from Washington City, a city that I had helped to create. And I went home. It was actually kind of a snowstorm. It was the worst trip that I ever had to make from Washington City to Monticello. I think eight creeks and streams that I had to forge. There were no bridges. I couldn't get my carriage to really operate in the muds and the blizzard. So I rode my horse instead. And it was blinding. And I feared that I would catch cold. I was leaving the presidency and exhaustion like so many presidents. The second term had been difficult because of the embargo crisis and the bird crisis. And my beloved protege, Mary Wyther Lewis, killed himself. I was exhausted and ready to go home. And it was a long, hard journey. But in a sense, it was symbolic. The last storm was the storm that led me from the capital back to the beloved pastoral world of Monticello. Thank you, Mr. Jefferson. We're taking a look at the

phase of Thomas Jefferson's life after he left the White House. We will return in just a moment after a short break. Welcome back to the Thomas Jefferson hour. Mr. Jefferson, you told us that you made one of the worst

trips imaginable back to Monticello after surrendering the presidency. What happened when you arrived home? Well, I found my estate in disarray, as always. And overseers are not always very competent. They can't manage one's farm as well as one self-canned. And there was a great deal to be done to finish Monticello and to repair the fields which had been eroded by many, many bouts of tobacco growth on the same plot. So I had a reform plan, of course, and I was in debt. I had to actually borrow money to leave Washington City to get home, even though I had been paid $25,000 per annum, which was a gigantic sum for the president in my day. Keep in mind all expenses had to come out of that budget. There was no separate budget for the running of the executive branch.

But I had to borrow cash just to get home. So I'm in debt and my fields are in disarray and the house is unfinished and needs work. And the dome is barely complete. So in many regards, you know, it's a comeuppance to realize that for eight years you've been devoted to the public commonwealth and the needs of an emerging democracy. And then suddenly you go home and the private business of life becomes compelling. Now, it's not all bad news. My daughter, Martha was there. She was the light of my life. And she had a number of children and would still have more. The house was busy with grandchildren. And I maintained my correspondence with really scores of people, hundreds of people around the world. So I was very delighted to be home exhausted from a life in public service and ready to devote my energies to literary pursuits,

scientific pursuits, and the health of my family and farms. Why do I not feel chaired by what you've just said, Mr. Jefferson? You've made it seem somewhat sad. Well, it's not sad because I didn't miss power. I didn't really want to be the president of the United States. I didn't want to stand for a second term. I certainly didn't want to stand for a third term, even though many people including former political adversaries urged me to stand for a third term. The country was in some disarray in 1809. Our relations with Britain were deteriorating rapidly. The embargo had been a failure. It had basically wounded, if not destroyed, much of the economy of the United States. New England, how old loudest, but Virginia actually suffered more from my total embargo of all imports and exports. But I saw that as clearly a more enlightened approach than going to war with Britain. But the World War that was existing between Britain and France was becoming a system

of desperation for both countries and a little America with all of its naïveté and its ideals was being ground up between these two giants of world geopolitical struggle. And so I left the presidency not in triumph. If I had left after my first term, I would have been able to come home younger, more vigorous, more satisfied with my term as president. There was a certain falling off because of the cloud of European affairs, which hung over much of my second term. No, my wife had been dead since 1782. I had never remarried. There had been the brief romance with Maria Cosway, and I had encouraged her many times to come to the New World to paint Niagara Falls and the natural bridge. I said that they were worth a trip across the Atlantic to see and paint. But she wasn't probably going to come to America. And by now that romance had cooled as they must when the head

reasserts itself. So I'm not suggesting any falling off in my life just exhaustion. And I'm an old man by now. You know, most people are dead by their 67th birthday. And when I saw the deplorable state of things at Monticello, I threw myself into reform and repair with my usual zeal and indefatigable energy and progressive approach to life. But in some regards, you leave the presidency to go home to die. And I never left the environs of Abber Marl County for the rest of my life. I think I went once to Richmond. Well, tell me, Mr. Jefferson, what did you do then? Okay, you got Monticello back on its feet. You always had to have a project beyond Monticello. Well, the main thing, of course, that I did was the University of Virginia. I was hoping you would suggest that. As I know, you know, I wanted to be remembered for three things, the Declaration

of Independence, the Virginia Statute for Religious Liberty and the University of Virginia. The first two of those came during my public life, the Declaration of Independence, 1776, the Virginia Statute for Religious Liberty, although it was written in the 1770s, wasn't passed into law. And finally, it passed thanks to James Madison in 1786. So these were early achievements. When I retired from the presidency, I might well just have gardened and put it about. But I thought there was one more thing that I really wanted to do with my life. And that was to create a secular public, centrally located, architecturally distinguished, enlightenment-based, rationalist, and scientific institution of higher learning in Virginia. And I spent from 1815 or so until 1825, making that happen. And in many regards, that took more steadiness of purpose and more patience and more political strategy than any previous activity of my life.

Fortunately, it came out splendidly in the end. And I lived to see the University of Virginia open at Charlottesville. But it was a long, difficult struggle. When you intended the University of Virginia to be unlike any university in the United States. Yes, in that no church affiliation, that it would be dedicated to the free pursuit of knowledge wherever it took us, that it would be a unified plan. You know, most colleges start with a building. The Ren building had William and Mary or the central buildings at Harvard College. And then as they expand, they decided to build more. I wanted a unified overall plan before I began. So strategic planning for the long term, you would call it in your time. And I designed the lawn, what I called my academic village, to be unified, that there would be a rotunda based upon the pantheon at one end.

And it would be open ended at the other. And it would be flanked by barracks or dormitories. And that these would feature a covered walkway so that students could wander around during the rains of Virginia. And that they would be intercepted periodically by multi-story buildings, which would be the classrooms and the domiciles of the faculty. And that these buildings would have a second purpose as architectural models that the classical orders, Tuscan and Corinthian and Ionic and Dorach and so on. The classical design elements that we had inherited from Greece and Rome would be on display visually. So the students would come to a place that was systematically planned with an integrated overall design where they would mingle freely with the faculty, the faculty would live on campus as it were in close proximity to the students. And that there would be visual satisfaction from the overall design, red brick. But also there would be in a

sense a living model of what the classical architecture had been. So all of that was the overall plan. Now if I had said that to the to the legislative body of Virginia in 1815, they would never have created the university. I had to use what really amounts to almost Machiavellian political strategy to bring this about. I started by getting an authorization for a central college or central academy in Avramaro. And then I slowly expanded the vision, always pushing the legislative branch as far as I dared. And in the end, we were able to produce this extraordinary, even magnificent academic village. But it came about gradually. And if I had attempted to present my overall plan immediately to the to the House of delegates in Virginia, I dare say they would have rejected it

out of hand. What other things did you engage in at this time, Mr. Jefferson? You were working hard to get the University of Virginia. You were improving Monticello. What other sorts of programs and projects did you have occurring? Well, I was still collecting books right up till 1815 when I sold my library to Congress. As you know, after I left the presidency, our relations with Britain deteriorated more and more. And eventually, their behavior, both economically and with respect to impressing our sailors on the high seas, led Mr. Madison to declare war. And the war of 1812, which was derisively by the Federalist called Mr. Madison's war, was a modest triumph for the United States. If I had been younger, I said I would like to lead a regiment. I was angry at the British, and my son-in-law did go to war, Thomas Mann ran off, but all of us felt angry at Britain, betrayed by Britain, that in some regards Britain ought to be our best friend in the

world, and instead it treated us so shabbily. So the war of 1812, as you know, was, in a sense, fought to a draw, but a draw was a victory for us. And we did rather well with our feeble little navy on the Great Lakes. And then at the end of the war, when Britain finally, in a sense, gave up, Jackson, the rising Andrew Jackson of Tennessee, fought that splendid battle at New Orleans, which was the last battle that turns out between the United States and Great Britain in history. But it was a sort of triumphant end to an otherwise lackluster war. You know, Madison was many things, but he was not much of a war president. The White House was burned at home. I never thought the White House was very distinguished architecturally. As I think you know, I submitted my own design. It was dollar. Who saved some of the paintings? She saved the great painting of George Washington. She literally carried it out her husband was, they flad, of course, that's what one does when the vandals are burning the city. The British came in and did great

damage to Washington City and burned it and burned the president's house. And Dolly Madison carried out the famous Stuart painting of George Washington. And the Madison's had to flee away. It's a ignominious moment for our new republic. The Library of Congress was burned. It was a tiny little library. You know, it really was a law library. The kind you would see in the judges chambers in your time. It wasn't a universal library. And I had been wanting it to be a more enlightenment base library all along. And now I saw an opportunity. I realized that my immense collection of books could not remain in private hands. That that would be a mistake. So they either had to go to Virginia or to the University of Virginia, which hadn't been really born yet, or to the government of the United States, with the thought of dispersing them at auction or leaving them to my family to disperse after my death seemed to me wrong headed. You know, this was not just a large library,

almost 6,500 volumes, but and I flatter myself when I say this, but I think it was probably the best chosen library in the new world. I worked very hard at it. I wasn't an indiscriminate buyer of books. I bought carefully. And I think that my collection on America, on Louisiana, on the west, on Indians was probably the finest in the world. So I thought, here's an opportunity. I'm broke. This library should not remain in private hands. The congressional libraries has disappeared. I've always wanted Congress to have a universal library rather than a particular legal judicial one. And so I wrote one of those letters. You asked about meddling in the affairs of my successor, James Madison. I wrote a letter to James Madison saying, be careful with this because I don't want a controversy. But if Congress were planning to replace its small congressional library, then I felt that mine would be a very appropriate base collection because it was about America. It was about the world of discovery. It was about science. It was the whole set of enlightenment

texts, a very rich collection of classical literature. So it was a brilliant library for the United States to acquire, but it would no longer simply be a congressional library. Now it would be, in a sense, the library of Congress, as you all understand it in your time. And I said to Mr. Madison, you know, there's no subject to which a legislator might not have reason to turn. I think we do them a disservice by thinking that the only thing that legislators need to know about are the history of law. Obviously, Mr. Madison was able to make the case. Your library was sold. It didn't do much to eliminate your debt. Well, it got me almost $24,000. So a year's presidential salary. That was about a quarter, I would say, of the actual value of my books. But there's no way that Congress is going to appropriate $100,000 for it. So it was a loss, but it was a gift. I mean, I actually always spoke of it as my seeding of my library to Congress. I chose to look on it as, in a sense, as a benevolent gift. I know that's not quite true. And I had to make

11 wagon loads. I made, I had special shelves constructed that could, could double as packing crates. And it was a very sad thing to, here's this library. And I, and I know where I got my tacitists. And I know when I bought my Montesquieu, and I remember the day in Paris when I bought my a third edition of a Pilateo's treatises on architecture. And I can remember reading Tristram Shandy in the, in the specific volume that I had. And, you know, there's a memory that goes with books. Books weren't in my time what they are in yours. They weren't, you know, paperback mass produced cheap, cheaply printed volumes, which in a sense are almost throw away items. A book in my world was a piece of art. It was a sensuous treasure. And I had very powerful memories, not of every book, but of many of the books that I owned, where I had been when I bought it, where I had been when I read it. What other books had inspired me to read there after. And so on.

And to put all those in crates, everyone, the contract with Congress required that I sell every book without a single exception. And then to watch them go in wagon loads from Charlottesville overland towards Washington City and then to look around and realize at the end of this process, there wasn't a single book in my house. I had lived with books from the time that I was conscious. My first memory is of being carried by a slave at the age of two. My father had 40 books, a large collection for the time. I didn't remember a single moment in my world where there wasn't a book handy and suddenly none. I'm sure you were not bookless for long. No, I wrote to Mr. Adams. And I said, I cannot live without books. And so I used a fair portion of the money from Congress to buy my third library, which only numbered about 2000 volumes. It wasn't meant to be universal library. I only bought what I wanted, mathematics and

classical texts and some reference works. But you know, I soon acquired that third library, but it was still melancholy to realize that I had spent a lifetime, I said once about a building in France, I stare at it like a lover at his mistress. I was like a lover with my books. And to put them in crates and ship them out and know that some grubby senator from New Hampshire is going to be thumbing through it without the proper reverence for its value or its ideas. Breaking its spine. Yeah, writing perhaps in the margins or, you know, spilling his coffee on it as he snoozes his way through his senatorial career. Some person with a third rate mind, presuming he can understand Montesquieu. Then why did you offer your books? I needed the cash. So you could buy another library, right? No, I wanted the country to have this splendid library. And I do think that, you know, I know it sounds vain, but it was a national treasure. There are very, I mean, Monticello is a private building and you conceive of it in your time

as a national treasure. The university was a public thing and I'm glad that it has gone on to become a very important university. You know, it's in your time, it's routinely regarded as one of the 10 best universities in America, arguably one of the 10 best universities in the world. So I'm vindicated. My architecture has been largely vindicated. My style as president has been largely vindicated. The Declaration of Independence is the world's most famous document and freedom in my library, but in some regards is even more important. Mr. Jefferson, you were in retirement when you were challenged to come up with your own Bible, too, are you not? Well, some of that was during the presidency, but then I've eventually, you know, sort of finished the work after my time as president. And the Bible had already been made into a scrapbook of the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. But I continued to wrestle with the problem of spirituality right up to the end. Mr. Jefferson, we've got to take a break and when we return, we'll have the scholar who soabally represents you, Clay Jenkins, in return and

speak of these latter years of yours. Thank you very much. Thank you, Citizen. Welcome back to the Thomas Jefferson Hour. We've been talking about the latter years of Thomas

Jefferson's life, post, White House. Mr. Jefferson had a great deal to say. Now Clay Jenkins sits across from me and probably will provide a bit of clarity on that time. Was Mr. Jefferson's retirement as satisfactory as he seems to make it? I think so. I mean, we don't know, of course, because Jefferson is the least self-revealing of men. You know, somebody once said that he's the most public of private men and the most private of public men. So we don't really know what's going on in his mind. But I think I take him seriously. You know, everybody likes to say Bill Clinton included when they leave office. I've been looking, I've been panting for retirement so I can get back to normal life and go into stores without being mobbed and read a book now and then and relax and take up so many of the many projects I had to put into bands in order to serve the public and it's all what the 18th century called Kant. Sloppy, self-serving, pious, disingenuous talk. Jefferson really meant it, I think. Bill Jefferson was a very private man and he had many things to do.

And you know, most people when they retire, slip into obscurity and slowly lose their life energy, the ebb. Jefferson didn't ebb. Jefferson was vigorous right up till the end, writing his horse every day, supervising the work in the fields, tearing down walls at Monticello, tearing down walls at Poplar Forest, collecting paintings and books and scientific instruments. And here he is, in 1815, he's born in 1743. So 1743 to 1800 is 57 years and add 15 more to that. So he's now 72 years old in 1815 and he decides to build a university. I mean, who at the age of 72 do we know? Who has that much soul left? Jefferson does it and he does it as perfectly as it can be done. Isn't that remarkable? He has to wade through a terrible political storm in order to do it. Has to cheat really to do it because the legislature was never going to grant this and then,

you know, one of the greatest things that I ever read was by Emerson. He said, an institution is the length and shadow of one man. If ever that were true, it's true in the University of Virginia. Jefferson conceived it and if he hadn't conceived it, it wouldn't have happened. Jefferson bought the land. He surveyed the land. He laid out the village. He designed the buildings. He supervised the making of the brick. He supervised the construction of the buildings. He then tried to hire the faculty. He had less success with that. He then made the arrangements, the sort of the honor code for the students. He bought the books for the first library at the University of Virginia. He lived to see the first class matriculated at it and he was involved in one of the early discipline scandals. He had to come in. There's a famous story of how there'd been a town gown drinking brawl, you know, typical of universities then and now. And the University had just opened and the young man, these brilliant young enlightenment revolutionaries, the Jefferson's always praising, you know,

went on a spree of some sort filled with too much ale or applejack. And so there was a big scandal. And Jefferson rode down the mountain on his horse, Eagle. He's an ancient man by now. It's 1825. He's a year from his death, so he's 82. He rides down the mountain and he comes into the room and he has to watch these students, including his grandson, be disciplined for gross malfeasance, for roistering, as we would call it. And the story is, it's probably somewhat apocryphal that the old man just sat there and wept. It's sort of beautiful and sort of touching and probably apocryphal, but it had to be interesting to be Jefferson, you know, to think of what he did. I mean, imagine it. I mean, you must feel a little of this as the pastor of a church and you watch the church grow and you watch the institution build. And I feel a little of it as one of the founders of the Shuttakwa movement, but these are pitiful things compared to creating a university,

creating a country, drafting the basic document that the country will never let go. I mean, Jefferson had reason to be much more proud than he was. He was so modest, given the massive achievement in every direction of Jefferson. One hardly knows how to respond. He continued to exercise control over those who would allow him. I know he talked the Monroe's into purchasing Ashlon Manor down the road where he could see, literally, from his rotunda, I believe. His whole life he had wanted to, he's Jefferson is a little bit of a true believer and a utopian. And his whole life, he'd wanted to create this kind of enlightenment colony. And guess where, you know, surrounding Monticello. So he's always tried to talk people into living there and he talked Monroe into it and he talked William Short, his favorite protege into buying property there, short, never built a place. He talked Philip Matsie, the Italian wine maker into living near Monticello. He kept badgering poor Madison to come move to leave Montpelier in orange and to come

over and build at Monticello. And Madison was, of course, sorely tempted to please the great man, but he had enough good sense to resist. And so Madison never came. He offered Joseph priestly a chance to live near Monticello, but what Jefferson had in mind was to create this colony of enlightenment philosophes like himself and they would all live near each other and they'd get together for splendid dinners and salon conversations and they would share out ideas and work. And that this would be the most marvelous thing in the world. And that's really his dream. The public life, we remember, you know, he's he's not on Mount Rushmore because of his salon vision. He's on Mount Rushmore because he was the president of the United States and he made the Louisiana purchase. But that for Jefferson was sort of the derailment of his life. He really saw himself as this gifted amateur scientist gardener living as a kind of puttering experimenter and architecture on a piece of ground that he was trying to make conform to a seven-year crop rotation system. And that he would be sort of this famous genius, retired modest genius who would do good things on

behalf of Opera Mile County and Virginia and the New World. And that was how he saw himself. Instead, he died and everything was immediately dispersed. Well, Jefferson could not live within his means. He spent more than he took in. He spent much more than he took in. And you know, Jefferson was in a way that you just have to blame him because when he died, the whole thing just fell down like a house of cards. And his daughter had to live in a sense on public charity. And the slaves at Monticello, he always said through his life, he's going to do something special for the slaves at Monticello. But you know, the only special thing he did was die so deeply and that they were unceremoniously auctioned shortly after his time. And a few or a few of the Heming's family were carved out of the mountain of debt for special treatment and manumission. But for the most part, he showed a kind of recklessness and a ruthlessness with respect to

what would happen to his family and his slaves. I'm sure he didn't want it to come out that way, but he did precious little to retrench. And so there's something there's something reckless in the very nature of being Jefferson. But it's a tragedy in a certain kind of way too because Jefferson was really, he was an aristocrat without money. So he was living the way he thought a person like himself should live. The only problem was there wasn't any cash. If he'd had money, this whole would have made perfect sense. Should have gone and married a woman with a great deal of money. That's what many aristocrats in a similar situation would do. That's what Aaron Bird does and that's what all of the British squires do when they run out of money. They marry the homely daughter of an industrialist from London who then brings 30,000 pounds here. You can't read Jane Austen without seeing this happen again and again and again that you marry into wealth and then you pretend that that wealth didn't come from something as grubby as trade.

That's Jefferson, but he didn't do it. It wasn't his style. No, no. So the end of his life is not a sad period. It's a brilliant period. We'll talk in our next program about the renewal of the friendship with John Adams and the death of Jefferson. It's a beautiful story. On the other hand, in he's busy and he makes the university and he's corresponding with everybody and he's still collecting and reading books and as alive as anyone can possibly be in his 70s and even up to his 81st year. But the sad part of all of this is that the whole system is falling apart. His son in law Thomas Mann Randolph is increasingly erratic and having nervous bouts and basically abandons his family. One of his granddaughters is beaten by her ruffian husband and she dies young. The the estate is so impucunious that the granddaughters don't really have they can't have coming out parties. They can't be invited into society. They they can't marry their social equals. They

have to marry tradesmen and the wealthy from New England and Jefferson's offspring. That's why the papers wound up in Massachusetts because one of his granddaughters married a coolage and the papers went to the North. You know from the point of view of what actually if you take the Jeffersonian lens off that rosy wonderful gardening sort of lens that Jefferson likes to live under and just look at it. It looks an awful lot like a stereotypical southern plantation that you might read about and gone with the wind. You know falling down the slaves with a very uncertain future. The threadbare clothing of the white people still splendid but threadbare living without money. The the the fields turning to weeds and heavy erosion. That that really is the picture of the last years of Jefferson's life. He ceased to have the energy to keep the whole thing going. Well he kept it going pretty well but boy the moment he died it just fell. I mean the only reason that it didn't fall sooner was just the country couldn't bear I suppose to to watch this happen and

you know what's interesting. John Quincy Adams read Jefferson's correspondence when it was published. I believe in 1832 so Jefferson's been dead for six years. His father's been dead for six years too and John Quincy Adams reads the collected specially selected correspondence of Jefferson that was published in 1832 by his grandson Thomas Jefferson Randolph and Adams hates Jefferson basically and really never forgives him for what Jefferson did to his father John Adams during the dark years. But when he comes to Jefferson's death of in the poverty that had overwhelmed him at the time of his death John Quincy Adams explodes in his diary and says it's not right that a man of this greatness should be allowed to die in debt. That the country owed men like Jefferson and John Adams and George Washington and Patrick Henry and Samuel Adams and Governor Morris. That class of people who really did give their lives their fortunes and their sacred honor to human liberty.

They owed them more. Look at Ulysses Grant rescued only by a last minute autobiography. Mark Twain got involved. Samuel Clemens helped to write that autobiography. Yes. Absolutely destitute though. But now today, President Bush, President Clinton, President Reagan, all they have to do is accept one of the thousands and thousands of offers they get from Kanagra or Sri Lanka or the United Church of Christ or the the building trades or the unions to go and give a speech at $250,000 or $150,000 or they can write a book of absolute Pablo and get $78 million for it even though the book is hardly worth reading by any rational being that they have friends. We like to put that word in quotations who build them libraries and build them loan them private jets and difference between Jefferson's friends and presidential friends today is that in Jefferson's time they were debts. They remain debts. In our time,

they become income. Indeed. Jefferson had to care for lots of people outside of himself and today it's basically a form of corruption I think. It's called crony capitalism. These cronies build you a little house. Remember when Nixon his friends wanted to build him a house in Southern California and the country was so angry with Nixon that it for bad that but you know we just live in a very different time and someone like Thomas Jefferson with his enormous gifts would have no trouble being a multi-millionaire today but in his own time barely able to put food on his table. Would he have become a multi-millionaire? Would he have accepted all of these offers or would he have somehow felt they were tainted? He'd be like Jimmy Carter. He'd be one of the people of great national virtue and he would only take $100,000 for the talk or $62,000 for the talk with of course you're going to do it because you need the money. And you know in Jefferson's case he deserved it. I mean four decades in public service. If anyone ever served his country it was Thomas

Jefferson. Now he didn't serve in war but my goodness he served in the arts of civilization and he I do think John Quincy Adams was right that he deserved better but the interesting story Bill crystal host of the Jefferson hour is that Jefferson was unendingly cheerful. No gloom surrounds Jefferson's late years. The whole thing's falling apart but he's wandering around this teacup building something. He's one of the great compartmentalizers. We should be so lucky to be able to compartmentalize our lives. Let me recommend some books last years of Thomas Jefferson whether there is passionate sage by Joseph Ellis which is about the last years of John Adams but it's very interesting because it's of course basically about the correspondence between Jefferson and John Adams. That's how they really define themselves and their retirement. Then there is Dumas Malone's masterful sixth and final volume of his Thomas Jefferson and his time. This one's called the sage of Monticello. It's my favorite of all of the six volumes in Dumas Malone's

Magisterial definitive biography of Jefferson and if if our listeners haven't read it and they only want to read one book on the late years of Jefferson they should read Dumas Malone's the sage of Monticello. It's available in paperback from any any bookstore or one of the online services. Then there is Lester Kappen who edited the Jefferson Adams letters which include all of the letters exchanged between the two atoms Abigail and John and Thomas Jefferson and that has a great deal on the last years of Jefferson's life. In another book that I really admire about the last only part of it is about the last years of Jefferson's life but it is by Merrill Peterson, Thomas Jefferson and the new nation. Then if you read any of the correspondence you know the one volume editions of Jefferson's correspondence they have letters that he wrote to a range of people during the last 17 years of his life after he left the presidency of the United States. So all of that I highly recommend we'll put those titles on our website www.thythengepherson.org. That's www.thythengepherson.org. Thank you very much for this biographical program play we've had a series and there remains

one more of the correspondence with John Adams. Good day. Music for the new Thomas Jefferson Hour was provided by Steven Swinford. You can visit Mr. Jefferson's homepage on the World Wide Web at www.th-gepherson.org. To order a copy of today's program or to ask Mr. Jefferson a question please call 1-888-458-1803. Again the number is 1-888-458-1803 or visit our website at www.th-gepherson.org. Thank you for listening and we hope you join us again next week for another entertaining, historically accurate and thought-provoking commentary through the eyes of Thomas Jefferson. The new Thomas Jefferson Hour is produced by High Plains Public Radio and New Enlightenment Radio Network, a non-profit organization dedicated to the search for truth in the tradition of Thomas Jefferson.

Thank you very much for listening and we hope you join us again next week for another interview with Thomas Jefferson.