Thomas Jefferson by Thomas S. Kidd

Author:Thomas S. Kidd
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300250060
Publisher: Yale University Press

9. “Strange Inconsistant Man”

The year 1804 saw Jefferson’s greatest triumph in politics: his resounding reelection as president. But the year was also clouded with grief. Deaths magnified his sense of advancing age as he entered his sixth decade of life. Joseph Priestley died in February 1804, but he and Jefferson were always closer intellectually than they were personally. A severer blow came in April, when his daughter Mary (Polly) died of complications from childbirth. He told his oldest friend John Page that “others may lose of their abundance; but, I, of my want, have lost, even the half of all I had. My evening prospects now hang on the slender thread of a single life”—the life of Martha (Patsy), his remaining child.1

A Christian framework helped him to interpret death—that of Mary and his own. “Every step shortens the distance we have to go,” he reminded Page. “The end of our journey is in sight, the bed wherein we are to rest, and to rise in the midst of the friends we have lost.” Citing I Thessalonians 4, Jefferson noted, “ ‘We sorrow not then as others who have no hope’; but look forward to the day which ‘joins us to the great majority.’ But whatever is to be our destiny, wisdom, as well as duty, dictates that we should acquiesce in the will of him whose it is to give and to take away [Job 1:21], and be contented in the enjoyment of those who are still permitted to be with us.” But Jefferson could not unhesitatingly embrace hope of a reunion with Mary or with his long-deceased wife. Even amid the pain of losing Mary, Jefferson could not say for sure if death was the end of existence, or if there was a future with lost loved ones. He resonated with an argument advanced by the French scientist and theologian Blaise Pascal in Pensées (1670), a book Jefferson had recently acquired. Pascal believed that it was prudent to accept the deaths of relatives as God’s will, and to hope for reunion in heaven. If the afterlife did not exist, death would just end one’s consciousness. There was little lost in hoping for an afterlife, and much to gain if it was true.2

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