Thomas Jefferson’s Two No Good, Very Bad Days

Derek Wheeler: There's plenty of ways to get lost at Monticello.

Lisa Francavilla: I got lost when I was going for my job interview.

Lisa Francavilla: I'm Lisa Francavilla, Senior Managing Editor of The Papers of Thomas Jefferson: the Retirement Series.

Derek Wheeler: My name is Derek Wheeler. I'm Research Archeologist here at Monticello, and welcome to the podcast "In the Course of Human Events."

Jeff Looney: I'm Jeff Looney, the Daniel P. Jordan Editor of the Papers of Thomas Jefferson at Monticello. I'm going to talk to you about a time when Thomas Jefferson had a near-drowning experience.

Jefferson Breaks His Arm

Just under two centuries ago, Thomas Jefferson had two very bad days during one six-month period, and the time in between was pretty miserable for him also. His bad patch began on November 12th, 1822. Jefferson was spending most of his waking hours supervising work on two building projects: one, the repair to the milldam at the foot of the hill on which Monticello stood; the other, construction of columns at the West Portico of Monticello itself. [00:01:02] During work on the colonnade there, Jefferson misjudged a step, fell off the terrace, and fractured his left arm.

In a letter to her fiancé, Jefferson's granddaughter, Virginia Randolph, described the accident in these terms: "He got a fall down one of the flights of steps leading from the terrace and broke his arm very near the wrist, besides cutting it badly and getting a slight wound on his head. You may easily imagine what a shock it was to us all, but after the setting of the bone by Dr. Watkins, and dressing the wound, the pain abated almost entirely, and tonight, every symptom is so favorable that our minds are greatly relieved."

At first, as Virginia reported, the wound didn't seem too bad. The very next day, Jefferson was able to resume his seat at the dinner table, and he himself described it as a fracture of, quote, "the most favorable character. . . . It hinders me from nothing which can be done with one hand."

Lisa Francavilla: We know that this was what he liked to do-- being able to watch his architectural visions being brought to life, and he wanted to be there and direct the work if he could. He's like, what, 79 at this time, and he is standing out there and you can just imagine him telling the laborers that were doing the work how to do it. I think just stepping backwards and falling off the porch is like, it's a very human thing to do, you know, and it's embarrassing because Jefferson was supposed to be in control, right? And he falls off the porch in front of everybody and causes a lot of fear and fright, as Virginia says.

Of course, there was no x-ray machine. So even when Dr. Watkins gets there, the only way he can tell if and where and how badly Jefferson's arm is broken is by actually looking at it, maybe poking and prodding at the arm bones, and asking Jefferson to move his arm and his wrist and his fingers. It seems to me that that would have been pretty painful. Jefferson always believed that if left to nature, the body would heal itself. But while he didn't have a very high opinion of physicians, he did recognize when he needed to consult one.

Derek Wheeler: Jefferson wanting to be in control definitely rings true to me. He gets very down into the minutia. The epitome of micromanaging has to do with the wheat harvest that was happening regularly at Monticello after 1800. Jefferson decided that they should put a granary in the middle of every agricultural field, bring all the wheat to a central point in the field, process it there, get the grain, and then haul that to the mill to be ground into flour. So Jefferson being a trained surveyor, he writes very explicit instructions. He says "fix compass at cherry tree and site in the chimney of a nearby dwelling. Then turn the compass 21 degrees and 15 minutes more to the east. Measure 30.6 poles," which is over 500 feet, "in that direction to find the center." and I'm sure without a doubt the overseer probably read the instructions, put the paper back in his pocket, kind of stared from that cherry tree walked for a minute and said, here. Here's the center of the field. And then they put the granary there.

Slow Healing

Jeff Looney: However, the wound proved very slow to heal. Seven weeks after the accident, Jefferson complained that he was still obliged to keep his left arm in a sling with no end in sight. While he was right-handed, that limb was also somewhat impaired from a decades-old fracture in his wrist, and with his left arm largely out of commission, he found himself unable to use the polygraph machine, a contraption that used two pens to make exact copies of his correspondence, and he therefore had to rely for the first time on his granddaughters to act as his secretaries and copy out his drafts of many of his letters so that he could send them out.

Lisa Francavilla: Today, a broken arm in a cast takes around six to eight weeks to heal, depending on how serious the injury is, but in Jefferson’s time, there was no casting going on. His arm was set, meaning it was wrapped tightly in bandages, and then it was in a sling, and it was just hanging there in the sling as Jefferson went on about his life. He’s not resting. He never rests. And in order for a broken arm in a bandage and in a sling to heal properly, he has to stop trying to do things, and resting is not something Jefferson ever liked to do. The fact that he didn't rest, the fact that it was not bandaged in such a way like today, where it would heal quickly, comparatively speaking, and the fact that he was, like I say, 79 years old. Yeah, it’s going to take a while. Six months is a long time.

Derek Wheeler: He clearly is not resting. I think he’s purposefully trying to stay as active as he was beforehand. That increases the healing time. And also the age, I mean, yeah, there are many people that, at that point in their life, they do take longer than the average 6 to 8 weeks that we consider a break taking to heal today.

Nail Filing

Jeff Looney: Jefferson hated to ask for this sort of help. By the following April, he had regained some manual dexterity, but a visitor remarked of the ex-president that the, quote, “feeling of independence for which he was always so remarkable exists still, to such an extent that when I was at Monticello last, Jefferson employed an hour or two in filing down the nails of his right hand, the file being fixed in a small vice, undergoing this drudgery rather than submit to employ the willing aid of any one of his granddaughters.”

Lisa Francavilla: Jefferson could be quite inventive, and while the story seems a little bit like an exaggeration, it does come from a letter written by Isaac Coles to William Short in April, 1823. Both these men were longtime friends of Thomas Jefferson and both had served as his secretary. We know from family letters that TJ was fine with allowing his granddaughters to take care of him. We know that they helped him through his severe rheumatic attacks, his chronic indigestive troubles, his headaches. They wrote letters for him. They carried messages for him. They read to him. But he may not have wanted anyone to be taking care of him in front of someone like Isaac Coles, someone who had known Jefferson for so long, had always seen Jefferson as this strong person, this kind of mentor. So it could be why Jefferson would have chosen to rig something up to help himself during Coles’s visit, rather than let one of his granddaughters or an enslaved servant help him.

Derek Wheeler: I would just also add, as a supposition, that Jefferson loved his privacy, and it may well have been that he went in there for 15 minutes to file his nails and then just took the rest of the time to rest, to allow himself to not show tiredness to friends and non-family members.

Lisa Francavilla: Yeah, exactly.

Derek Wheeler: On the other hand, none of us know how long Jefferson took to file his nails when his arm was okay. Maybe, maybe this was a half-hour process.

The Near-Drowning Incident

Jeff Looney: this brings us to the second very bad day. For most of his adult life, Jefferson spent hours on a daily horseback ride, rambling around the neighborhood and enjoying fresh air and the sights of nature. He relished this one interlude of solitary reflection, and always traveled alone, even while he was president. He had resumed these solo rides within two weeks of his accident, even with one arm in a sling.

The sling was still there six months later in May, 1823, when a horrified Virginia Randolph reported to her fiancé that, quote, “We have all had a dreadful shock at an accident which was near proving fatal to my dear grandfather the other day in the river, and are more miserable than ever at his persisting in the practice of riding without a servant to attend him while his arm is still in a sling and quite helpless. His horse mired in the river and fell, confining Grandpapa's legs under him, and although not hurt by that, he would inevitably have been drowned had not the rapidity of the current carried him down to a much shallower place, where, by reaching the bottom of the river with his hand, he was enabled to rise on his feet and get out. He says it would have been thought by everyone that visited the spot, if he had been drowned, that he had committed suicide."

Why this last wry comment by Jefferson about suicide? He was probably remarking with gallows humor on his growing financial problems. Jefferson had carried a sizable burden of debt for many years, but a national depression that began in 1819, his unwillingness to curtail his spending on luxury goods, like imported wine, and his unwise decision to endorse $20,000 in notes from a family connection, who promptly went bankrupt and left him holding the bag, had reduced Jefferson to insolvency.

Lisa Francavilla: When we say Jefferson would go on these daily rides around his farms, I don't know what that means. How much ground is he covering?

Derek Wheeler: Jefferson owned over 5,000 acres in Albemarle County, with a little less than half of that, about 2,000 acres, being what we would call the "actively managed" plantation. There was the Rivanna River, where the drowning incident almost occurs, running right through the middle of the plantation. And two farms lie to the north of the Rivanna: Shadwell, where Jefferson was born, as well as Lego. The ford across the river where I'm guessing he fell off his horse is the ford that connects Monticello to Shadwell. That is about a mile and a quarter from the mansion house, so not a terribly long ride. One thing I'm interested in is why he decided to cross the Rivanna in the first place. But the ford was just below his mill dam and the beginning of the canal that led to the mills at Shadwell. So my best guess is that he was going to visit the mills.

Lisa Francavilla: Maybe he was just out enjoying nature and going for a nice ride in the sun and maybe enjoying some peace and quiet away from the visitors at Monticello and away from a house full of family and enslaved domestic servants and away from his writing desk. We have some quite vivid accounts of meeting Mr. Jefferson on horseback. So maybe he is deliberately avoiding the roads in order to avoid having to meet anybody who's on their way up to see him at Monticello.

Derek Wheeler: That's true, yes. But there's definitely plenty of roads that he could get away and not be seen. What was Jefferson doing associated with the mills at this time? The repair to the milldam. And I think for the next few months afterwards, he was very concerned about the low water on the river and that his ground wheat, his flour, could not be shipped down to Richmond for sale. Jefferson noted from the end of his presidency, he had to rely on the produce of his farm. That was his only income. And so any delay in getting a crop sold, he was going to have to contact his creditors to let them know that there was going to be a delay in payment.

Lisa Francavilla: Something he had to do quite regularly. God bless the family letters, because if they weren't writing to each other. Jefferson's fall in the river. We wouldn't even know about if it wasn't for Virginia's letter, and we certainly wouldn't know about the suicide comment.

Other members of the family were very aware of the amount of debt that Jefferson was carrying. You imagine conversations happening, and it makes me think about who else is present while these conversations are going on. The enslaved servants were always present. I wonder what they might've known about his finances and his indebtedness. Jefferson's death had serious consequences for his enslaved people. Within just a few years of Jefferson's death, his enslaved people were separated from their family and friends and from the only home they'd known through auction. 

Maintaining Independence

Jeff Looney: Thus, he had financial ruin as well as a gradually failing body on his mind as he hauled himself out of the Rivanna River that late spring day in 1823. However, Jefferson carried on. He eventually got his arm out of that sling and managed to live out his remaining years at Monticello; to enjoy triumphal visits from the Marquis de Lafayette in 1824 and 1825; to see the opening of the University of Virginia, his last great achievement and an institution that he described as "the hobby of my old age." And, much to the chagrin of his family, even after his near-drowning incident, Jefferson kept up those solo horseback rides to the very end.

Lisa Francavilla: Jefferson's family is worried about him all the time. His friends are worried about him all the time as he ages. They get really frustrated with him insisting on making these long carriage trips down to Poplar Forest, which is a huge distance. It's 90 miles each way, and it's over terrible roads that were hard on him because of his arthritis. He would often arrive at Poplar Forest being quite ill from the ride and in a lot of pain from his rheumatism. They get upset with him because he'll insist on riding back from this distant neighbor's plantation at night in the rain because he's Jefferson and that's what you just do. I'm sure that these kinds of concerns for an aging friend or family will sound familiar to a lot of people today when you're faced with a grandparent or a parent who is 80 years old and maybe shouldn't be driving their car around all the time, or at least not by themselves.

Derek Wheeler: The loss of independence is central to many, many people, from losing your license and no longer being able to drive, or just simply acknowledging that you need a walker or some kind of other aid, a wheelchair, to get around. A lot of people, including people in my own family, it's hard to accept this new reality, and clearly Jefferson refused to acknowledge that he could not go on a horse ride.

Lisa Francavilla: In this time period, when these two accidents occur, he's writing and he's acknowledging to only a handful of very close friends that he's used to taking on so much. He's used to doing all these things. He's used to doing whatever he sets his mind to. And his mind is still willing, and his mind and his spirits still want to do these things, but he's starting really just barely to acknowledge the fact that maybe his body isn't up to it.

Conclusion

Jeff Looney: A later family history recalled that as late as the spring of 1826, with only weeks left to live, quote, "Though enfeebled by age and disease, Jefferson turned a deaf ear to his daughter Martha Randolph's entreaties that he would allow his faithful enslaved servant, Burwell Colbert, to accompany him in his daily rides. Jefferson said if his family insisted that he would give up his rides entirely, but that he had helped himself from his childhood, and that the presence of a servant in his daily musings with nature would be irksome to him. So, until within a very short time of his death, old Eagle, his horse, was brought up every day, even when his venerable master was so weak that he could only get into the saddle by stepping down from the terrace," end quote. Thus, for those of us who are beginning to experience what he described as the hand of age, Jefferson's refusal, even after he passed his 80th year, to let growing infirmity keep him from living his life can perhaps serve as an inspiration.

Derek Wheeler: When Jefferson was preparing for his horse rides, the horse would have been brought most likely to the east front of the house, which is the side of the house that you enter when you visit Monticello today. And then he would have taken the road straight from there and down through the roundabouts and across the plantation. Today, visitors can go on the first roundabout, which is closest to Monticello, as well as take some paths that follow other roundabouts between the visitor center and the main mansion house today. As one of the archeologists on staff at Monticello, I lead walks to various archaeological sites on the plantation. In Virginia, October is Archaeology Month, so every October, we will have walking tours that will follow some of the roads that Jefferson would have ridden on.

Lisa Francavilla: I love these walks because they really help you to see the larger world that was Monticello and imagine the landscape and how it was used and how it was occupied.

This is a really remarkable story about Jefferson. It was quite surprising and I'm really glad that Jeff Looney was able to share it with us. Thanks for joining us, and thanks Derek for having this chat with me. I think it's been fun.

Derek Wheeler: And thank you, Lisa. This has been very enlightening. Archaeology can tell us some, but the documents and the letters, family letters, especially, are very elucidating.