Monticello Blog

The rivalry between Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr greatly influenced the outcome of the election of 1800 that sent Thomas Jefferson to the White House in 1801.

Imagine a world where life moved at four miles an hour, and the most one could readily travel in a day was just thirty miles. Such was the slow world Thomas Jefferson was born into in 1742.

For Jefferson, almost any activity could be transformed into an act of citizenship.

Thomas Jefferson had an enemy in Alexander Hamilton, a frenemy in John Adams, and his BFF in James Madison. Jefferson and Madison formed a political partnership and personal friendship that made them the dynamic duo of the Founding Fathers.

Despite thousands of surviving documents, LMonticello’s curators have only recently fully understood Jefferson’s comprehensive system for drafting and organizing his correspondence. These eight original objects served as components or tools that Jefferson used to arrange incoming letters, respond to them, often after “elaborate research,” copy his own letters, and organize everything for easy retrieval – even decades later. Jefferson’s Cabinet and Library were the hub of his reading and writing activities.

Before he was President, before he wrote the Declaration of Independence, before the American Revolution, Thomas Jefferson feared an invisible enemy.

On February 5, 1769, Thomas Jefferson replied to his cousin’s request that his son study law under him. Writing from Shadwell, his boyhood home, Jefferson said he must decline: "I do not expect to be here more than two months in the whole between this and November next, at which time I propose to remove to another habitation which I am about to erect."

In 1786, Thomas Jefferson took a serious fall in Paris, dislocating and possibly breaking his right wrist and pain in his joint troubled him as he aged.

Thomas Jefferson returns to the mountaintop.

While historians have been quick to highlight the national reasons for Jefferson’s vocal support for the admission of Missouri, the situation at Monticello that shaped his thinking has been largely overlooked. In September 1819, Jefferson had agreed to be guarantor of two $10,000 loans for his friend Wilson Cary Nicholas, who promptly died the following year.