Twilight at Monticello The final years of Thomas Jefferson

Jefferson's retirement was not entirely one of repose. Crawford catalogs many a vexation in Jefferson's 17 years of life after the presidency, opening with an 1819 near-fatal fracas between a grandson and a drunkard husband of a granddaughter. Domestic matters intruded insistently upon the pater familias, creating webs of debatable detail about Jefferson that render him continually fascinating to read about. Crawford richly cultivates Jeffersonian ambiguities, or hypocrisies to harsher minds, most saliently his opposition to slavery and his ownership of slaves. Another inconsistency was Jefferson's meticulous financial record keeping: his frugality in the account books never translated, until far too late, into recognition of indebtedness that ultimately impoverished Jefferson's heirs. On the happier side, and far more congenial to Jefferson's belief in rationalism, Crawford ably recounts his correspondence with John Adams and his role in the establishment of the University of Virginia. Playing out in the rooms and gardens of Monticello, Crawford's judiciously written history evokes the joys and strains, including the Sally Hemings controversy, of Jefferson's late-life family affairs.--Taylor, Gilbert Copyright 2007 Booklist

Crawford (Unwise Passions: A True Story of a Remarkable Woman) does a thorough if artless job of narrating Thomas Jefferson's postpresidential years. Crawford's narrative is a slave to chronology, which works against him. The first 50 pages are a highly condensed account of his life up through his presidency: information which, if it must be included, could have been more elegantly inserted into the main narrative. After this false start, Crawford's story improves as he delivers an exhaustive account of Jefferson's tangled dotage: the attempted murder of his much-loved grandson by another relative, his dealings with other descendants both white and black; his de facto bankruptcy; and his late relations with such fellow founders as Adams and Madison. Much of this has been recounted before, though interesting and surprising details abound. For example, a young Edgar Allan Poe was at Jefferson's funeral. Despite all this diligence, however, Crawford's narrative regularly stops dead in its tracks, especially when the author crawls inside Jefferson's head, presuming to know his thoughts at a given moment. Crawford is quite sure, for example, that on the first day of February 1819, Jefferson dwelled upon "the planters' financial plight, and his own... but this difficulty, Jefferson told himself, was surely temporary." (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

These books offer distinct perspectives and insights into public and private moments in the life of Thomas Jefferson, first U.S. secretary of state and third President-and one of the most fascinating figures in American history. Cerami (Jefferson's Great Gamble) offers a second work on Jefferson as perceptive and well written as his first. This time his focus is the long-standing personal and political feud between Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton, secretary of the Treasury. Fearing that tensions between them on issues such as agriculture versus industry, states' versus federal rights, and South versus North would destroy the new nation, Jefferson reluctantly saw that his country would survive only through compromise. It was 1790. He invited Hamilton and his own ally, James Madison (aware of the purpose of the evening), to a private dinner at his home, then in New York. Compromise was achieved, Jefferson and Madison agreeing not to oppose federal assumption of states' war debts, Hamilton agreeing to the national capital being constructed in northern Virginia. Cerami wittily recounts the evening in rich detail, embracing the culinary details as well as the larger story of President Washington's quarrelsome cabinet, the evolution of the dual party system, and Jefferson's emergence as a persuasive national leader. Crawford (Thunder on the Right) offers his own equally compelling look, in this case at Jefferson's life, post-presidency, from 1809 until his death in 1826. Then a private citizen, Jefferson was burdened by financial and personal and political struggles within his extended family. His beloved estate, Monticello, was costly to maintain and Jefferson was in debt. Newly studying primary sources, Crawford thoroughly conveys the pathos of Jefferson's last years, even as he successfully established the University of Virginia (America's first wholly secular university) and maintained contact with James Madison, John Adams, and other luminaries. He personally struggled with political, moral, and religious issues; Crawford shows us a complex, self-contradictory, idealistic, yet tragic figure, helpless to stabilize his family and finances. Historians and informed readers alike will find much to relish in both of these distinctive works of original scholarship. Both are recommended for academic and large public libraries. [For Crawford, see Prepub Alert, LJ 9/1/07.]-Douglas King, Univ. of South Carolina, Thomas Cooper Lib., Columbia (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Event-filled but melancholy history of the 17 years following Jefferson's departure from the presidency in 1809. The 66-year-old retiree was an international icon who received a steady stream of visitors and mail, writes Crawford (Unwise Passions: A True Story of a Remarkable Woman and the First Great Scandal of Eighteenth-Century America, 2000, etc.). His visitors eagerly set down their experiences, and Jefferson was an indefatigable letter-writer, so scholars have access to a mountain of material, capped by the legendary correspondence with John Adams. Money rarely left Jefferson's thoughts during his final years. Presidential pensions did not exist, and he was juggling huge loans. He expected to live off his 10,000 acres and 200 slaves, a characteristically unrealistic financial plan--much of the book is taken up by accounts of his ineffectual efforts to better his fortune. Crawford's chronicle of the founding of the University of Virginia, which Jefferson considered his greatest achievement next to the Declaration of Independence, details the president's difficulties with the state legislature: True Jeffersonians, the lawmakers didn't want to spend the money. A dedicated acolyte of the Enlightenment, Jefferson disliked the increasingly urban, populist and religious America of his retirement years. He also disliked the uneducated, pugnacious politicians (such as Andrew Jackson) preferred by new states west of the Appalachians. This distaste belied his credentials as a fervent, egalitarian democrat, but Jefferson was a man of disturbing contradictions. Historians love to quote his eloquent youthful denunciations of slavery, but Crawford reminds us that in retirement, immune from political damage, he refused to speak out and counseled correspondents against action. During the first great political debate on slavery in 1820, he unconditionally supported the Southern position. Detailed explanations of the Negro's inferiority from a man who prided himself on his scientific acumen make sad reading, as does the steady decay of Jefferson's personal and financial fortunes. Nonetheless, nearly all of his thoughts and actions merit attention. Insightful analysis and lucid prose make this autumnal portrait a rewarding experience. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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 of movement. 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 Excerpted from Twilight at Monticello: The Final Years of Thomas Jefferson by Alan Pell Crawford All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.