In March of 1807 Thomas Jefferson wrote to the comte de Diodati-Tronchin, an old friend from his days among the diplomats at Versailles. Reminiscing about ‘the many happy hours’ he had spent with the comte and Madame Diodati on the banks of the Seine, Jefferson recalled, ‘those were indeed days of tranquility & happiness’. Jefferson then shifted his focus from personal matters to the geopolitical situation. Writing from the comfort of his home at Monticello, he drew an unfavorable contrast between the tumult to be seen in Napoleonic Europe and the supposed tranquility of Jeffersonian America.

Were I in Europe pax...

Throughout his adult life Thomas Jefferson dispensed academic and educational advice to younger relatives, friends and protégés. For fifty years he based his ideas on a ‘course of reading’ that he had developed during the 1760s after he completed his own studies at William and Mary. Jefferson recommended that students should read across a range of subjects because ‘Variety relieves the mind, as well as the eye, palled with too long attention to a single object.’ According to Jefferson’s plan, the period from sunrise until eight o’clock in the morning should be devoted to the study of the natural sciences,...

During his retirement Thomas Jefferson was increasingly preoccupied with the history of the American Revolution and its aftermath. As the years passed and the number of men and women who had lived through the struggle for independence dwindled, Jefferson despaired of preserving the history of the Revolution. In 1815 he wrote to John Adams, ‘On the subject of the history of the American Revolution, you ask who shall write it? Who can write it? And who will ever be able to write it? Nobody; except merely its external facts.’ This was because ‘all it’s councils, designs and discussions, having been...

During the summer of 1809, several months after Thomas Jefferson had left the presidency and retired permanently to Monticello, John W. Campbell, a bookseller and printer from Petersburg, Virginia, wrote to him proposing to publish ‘a complete edition of your different writings, as far as they may be designed for the public; including the “Notes on Virginia” ’. Jefferson was not especially encouraging in his reply to Campbell. He wrote that he intended to revise and enlarge his Notes on Virginia before it could be republished. With regard to the large body of official papers he had generated as a...

It is impossible to study the development of Thomas Jefferson’s reputation since World War II without reference to the two institutions that have shaped and continue to dominate our understanding of Jefferson: The Papers of Thomas Jefferson and the Thomas Jefferson Foundation. Under the direction of Julian P. Boyd and his successors, the Princeton edition of The Papers of Thomas Jefferson has evolved into a sizeable, long-lived and immensely important entity. The Papers, along with the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, have been the driving forces behind the study of Jefferson since the mid-twentieth century. While the Papers have transformed Jefferson scholarship,...

Thomas Jefferson died at Monticello on 4 July 1826, the fiftieth anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence. In the months before his death, Jefferson prepared for the posthumous struggle over his place in history. As we have seen, he filed and organized his papers, which he left to his grandson, Thomas Jefferson Randolph, anticipating their future publication. He also designed his tombstone. He left specific instructions that his grave should be marked by a six-foot obelisk set atop a three foot square cube, of ‘coarse stone’. Jefferson composed a simple epitaph that he wanted inscribed on the...

On 12 April 2001, President George W. Bush welcomed several dozen descendants of Thomas Jefferson to the White House to commemorate the 258th birthday of his predecessor. The gathering included persons descended from Jefferson and his wife, Martha Wayles Jefferson, as well as those descended from Jefferson and one of his slaves, Sally Hemings. ‘I want to thank all the descendants of Thomas Jefferson who are here,’ declared Bush. The president added, surveying the mixed-race gathering, ‘No wonder America sees itself in Thomas Jefferson.’¹ In so doing Bush entered into a two-hundred-year-old controversy concerning Jefferson’s paternity of Sally Hemings’s children....

In 2003 several teachers at the Thomas Jefferson Elementary School in Berkeley, California, wrote to the parent-teacher association to propose changing the name of the school. The teachers appealed to the parents because, ‘For some of our staff, it has become increasingly uncomfortable to work at a site whose name honors a slaveholder.’ After a lengthy consultation, the students, staff and parents at the school submitted a petition to the Berkeley school board requesting that the school be renamed Sequoia, after California’s giant redwood tree. For proponents of the name change, Jefferson’s association with slavery outweighed his various achievements. ‘Thomas...

In April 1809, one month into his retirement, Jefferson wrote to his friend and successor in the White House, James Madison, concerning the international situation. Despite wartime restrictions on American trade imposed by the major European belligerents, Britain and France, Jefferson was fairly sanguine about the state of affairs. He felt that the United States was in an especially strong position vis-à-vis Napoleon. Believing that the French emperor depended on American trade, Jefferson wrote:

He ought the more to conciliate our good will, as we can be such an obstacle to the new career opening on him in the Spanish...

On 17 February 1826, Thomas Jefferson, who was then eighty-two years old and in declining health, wrote a letter to his old friend and political ally James Madison. He wrote at length about securing funding, qualified faculty and books for the new University of Virginia. He expressed particular concern that he and Madison should be ‘rigorously attentive’ to political principles when appointing the university’s law professor. Jefferson felt that legal education in the United States was dominated by conservative counter-revolutionaries imbued with ‘toryism’, as he termed it. The new lawyers, complained Jefferson, ‘no longer know what whigism or republicanism means’....