Joseph J. Ellis by American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson

Author:American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Thomas, Thomas - Psychology, Presidents & Heads of State, Fiction, United States, Jefferson, Historical, Revolutionary Period (1775-1800), Biography & Autobiography, History
ISBN: 9780679764410
Publisher: Random House Digital, Inc.
Published: 1997-01-02T06:00:00+00:00

5

MONTICELLO, 1816–26

I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past.

—JEFFERSON TO JOHN ADAMS

AUGUST 1, 1816

I regret that I am now to die in the belief that the useless sacrifice of themselves by the generation of 1776… is to be thrown away by the unwise and unworthy passions of their sons, and that my only consolation is to be, that I live not to weep over it.

—JEFFERSON TO JOHN HOLMES

APRIL 22, 1820

VISITORS DURING his last decade could catch a glimpse of the ex-president astride his favorite horse in the early afternoon of most days, when he rode Eagle for two or three hours through the fields and woods around Monticello. Time had taken its inevitable toll on his aging body in all the little ways that accumulate in the joints and arteries of formerly athletic young men past their prime. But the nagging disabilities that made rising from a chair or walking through his garden more difficult somehow disappeared once he was on horseback. (In 1809, when he was sixty-five, he had taken his final ride home from Washington to permanent retirement without assistance and had pressed on for the final eight hours through a driving snowstorm.) As Eagle aged along with him and became Old Eagle, the members of the family worried that these solitary rides each afternoon placed both man and mount at some risk. But Jefferson brushed aside such cautionary concerns, explaining that, while an old man on his own legs, he was still a young man in the saddle. Even after he broke his arm in a fall off the back steps of Monticello in 1822, he insisted on his daily ride. He had Old Eagle brought up to the terrace so that he could be mounted from the height of the porch, eased himself into the saddle with his good arm while the horse leaned patiently against the terrace wall, then assumed the bolt-straight posture of a born rider and trotted off like a natural aristocrat keeping his appointment with destiny.1

We know more about his physical appearance and daily regimen during his last decade than at any other period of his life. He was, after all, a prominent member of America’s founding generation, obviously destined to take his place in the history books, so visitors felt a special urge to record their impressions of the Sage of Monticello for posterity. The inexorable ravages of the aging process also forced Jefferson himself to chronicle the physical and medical realities as they encroached upon his earlier indifference to such matters. He remained to the end congenitally suspicious of all doctors, claiming that whenever he saw three physicians together, “he looked up to see if there was not a turkey-buzzard in the neighborhood.” But he also recognized, as he reported to Adams, that “our machines have been now running for 70 or 80 years, and we must expect that worn as they are; here a pivot, there a wheel, now a pinion, next a spring, will be giving way.

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