"Thomas Jefferson, Rachel & Me" Chapter 1

Unable are the loved to die. For love is immortality.

—Emily Dickinson

You ask if I would agree to live my 70 or rather 73 years over again? To which I say Yea. I think with you that it is a good world on the whole, that it has been framed on a principle of benevolence . . .   I steer my bark with Hope in the head, leaving Fear astern.

—Thomas Jefferson to John Adams,

nine years before Jefferson’s death

    Chapter One

I met the man I truly believe was Thomas Jefferson at Monticello one summer evening, when big trees cast long shadows across the west lawn of Jefferson’s mountaintop.

I had booked the special tour they offer at the end of the day, after the gate on the entry road has gone down. If your name is on a list, a guard lets you through, and after you drive partway up the hill and park in the nearly empty lot, a guide tells you where to meet the shuttle for the ride the rest of the way up the mountain.

In the dying light streaming through the west windows and doorways of Jefferson’s house, the evening tour makes you feel closer to him than just another tourist in the restless crowds that clomp through all day. It’s easy to picture his valet, Burwell Colbert, lighting the wick in the whale oil lamp that still hangs in his library as Jefferson, stretched out on his red leather chaise longue, puts up his slippered feet with a good book, something in the original Greek.

His bed is just down a hallway, under an arched alcove that divides his dressing room from his study. If you stand beside the bed on the dressing room side, you can see the splash stains he left on the floor when he got up at dawn every day and plunged his feet into a bowl of cold water. While the rest of my evening group wandered off with the guide, I lingered to gaze at the stains and felt he could not be far away.

Why have I been so interested in this man, even as a boy, long before I began my career as a history teacher? I lack his boundless faith in mankind and the proper functioning of the cosmos. I am no genius.  I lack the brilliance, the discipline, the focus and the rigidly good habits of Thomas Jefferson — if those are the right words for a man who, like so many plantation masters, fathered children with their slaves, children from whom Jefferson carefully kept his distance.

Jefferson always behaved as if he had no regrets. I have regrets. I was not a good father. I was not a good husband. Until him, I’m not sure I was ever a good friend.

After the hour-long tour, they let us wander the grounds for half an hour. I wanted the fantasy of feeling alone on Jefferson’s mountaintop so I headed away from the others. I walked slowly in the grass along the foundation of the house, letting my hand glide over the walls, feeling the rough, sandy texture of the red clay bricks, each one made by Jefferson’s slaves.

When I reached the south terrace — one of two elevated walkways that form wings from the main house — I climbed the steps and walked to the small brick office at the end that Jefferson called a pavilion. It was the first building he put up at Monticello, when he was a young man. 

I peered through the rippled glass of its French doors and studied the room into which he had carried his bride after riding through a snowstorm. He had lit a fire and found a bottle of wine on a shelf behind some books. Nine months later, his first child was born, the only one of six — not counting the five or six more he had with his mistress — to survive beyond his middle age. The deaths all hurt him. When his wife, Martha, died less than 10 years later, he fell apart. He locked himself in his rooms for weeks, finally emerging only to wander his woods and grounds for hours alone, on foot or horseback.