Passed Presidents - # 3 – Thomas Jefferson

It seems only fitting to follow the John Adams grave story with Thomas Jefferson’s.  Our third president passed away on Independence Day, 1826, a few hours before the second gave up the ghost.  Almost two centuries later, in the 24/7 news cycle and internet era, Adams would have known that his dear friend was gone and not mistakenly uttered his famous last words, “Jefferson survives.”

 “Monticello”, Thomas Jefferson’s home, near Charlottesville, VA 
(30 June 2008)

I first saw Monticello in 1991.  The property is a private, non-profit concern and not a state or National Park site.  It was well before the ‘Dead Presidents Quest’ began and the visit was a minor disappointment because the place was undergoing serious restoration.  I took a picture of the iconic home and it is among my growing file of images called, “LANDMARKS UNDER SCAFFOLDING.”  More on that in a future post.

Ornamental gate in front of Thomas Jefferson grave (30 June 2008)

The visit that produced these images occurred in June 2008.  It was the last day of my post-retirement Road Trip IV, a terrific, 24-day odyssey that completed the grave-hunting quest and solidified the State Capitol adventure as the next serious undertaking.  Fittingly, I drove to Charlottesville after shooting the Virginia capitol that Jefferson designed in Richmond.

Unlike our modern presidents, our Founding Fathers, as we like to call them, operated in two worlds.  They were first British subjects, living in a string of colonies on the east coast of North America and ruled by the king and Parliament on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean.  To the north, south and west were colonies controlled by France and Spain.  Jefferson was the principal author of the Declaration that severed our control by Europe and he worked with these extraordinary people to craft and sustain a new kind of government...the finest representative democracy the world has known (in my humble opinion). 

 Jefferson’s Epitaph (30 June 2008)

Jefferson wrote this and considered these accomplishments

more important than having been president.

  

As president, he signed the Louisiana Purchase which doubled the size of the nation...828,000 square miles of territory...land that would become all or part of 15 states...for the price of what a modern hedge fund manager earns in a month.  Yeah, I know...a dollar went further in those days.

In 1962, President Kennedy hosted a dinner for 49 Nobel Prize winners.  In his welcoming remarks, he said, “I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.”

Of all the presidents, Jefferson was our own Renaissance Man.  He read Latin and Greek.  He spoke French and was an accomplished violinist.  He was an architect, scientist and engineer who constantly tinkered with ways to do things better.  When the British sacked Washington and destroyed the small Library of Congress, his personal library became the foundation for its replacement.   He not only founded the University of Virginia, he designed the buildings, developed the curriculum, recruited the faculty and acquired the library.

Thomas Jefferson

3^rd President; Served 1801-1809

Born: April 13, 1743, Goochland County, VA

Died: July 4, 1826, Charlottesville, VA

Grave Location: Plantation Home – Monticello, Charlottesville, VA

Date Visited: June 30, 2008

I sometimes despair at these modern times, where someone with ‘elite’ qualities is disparaged and Americans admit they are more drawn to a president they could have a beer with.  I’ll take a man like Jefferson every time.