The 575 documentents in this volume cover the period from 1 July 1823 to 31 March 1824. During this time Jefferson continued to be interested in events both foreign and domestic. The success of the Holy Alliance in crushing liberal political movements in Naples and Spain raised the prospect that it would soon turn its attention to the newly independent Spanish colonies in the New World. After close consultation with his predecessors Jefferson and James Madison, and with the initial support of the British government, James Monroe announced on 2 December 1823 what would later become known as the “Monroe Doctrine,” stating in a message to Congress that “the American Continents . . . are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European Power.” This policy did not, Jefferson thought, preclude the United States from doing so. In October 1823 he asked Monroe whether we wished “to acquire to our own Confederacy any one or more of the Spanish provinces?” He went on to “candidly confess that I have ever looked on Cuba as the most interesting addition which could ever be made to our system of states.” Greece’s attempt to secure its independence from the Ottoman Empire garnered Jefferson’s attention and sympathy as well, and led to a fascinating exchange of letters with the noted Greek scholar, physician, and political leader Adamantios Coray.
All the while, the upcoming presidential election of 1824 captivated the nation. Although Jefferson tried to stay out of it, various newspapers expressed their opinions about his preferences and attempted to make political hay whenever they caught wind of a possible visit to Monticello by one of the leading candidates. Jefferson worried that the Federalists who had recently joined the Republican ranks had not abandoned their former, to his mind wrongheaded, views. He also expressed concern that the process of amending the United States Constitution, because of the large number of small states, was too difficult, and he stated that he had “ever considered the constitutional mode of election” of president, which was to be decided, in the event of an indecisive outcome in the Electoral College, “ultimately by the legislature voting by states, as the most dangerous blot in our constitution.” Controversies over the origin and composition of the Declaration of Independence put forward by John Jay and Timothy Pickering led to lively exchanges between the three living ex-presidents, and Jefferson continued to look to the dispersion of slaves westward and the emigration of free Blacks from the United States to Haiti, where they might live under “a government of their colour,” as his preferred solutions to the blight of chattel slavery. Late in February 1824, the noted British political reformer John Cartwright sent Jefferson two of his works on the English constitution, along with a copy of a lengthy letter he had written to John Quincy Adams discussing, in a friendly manner, the things he thought might pose a threat to the perpetuation of liberty in the United States.
As before, the establishment and construction of the University of Virginia took up much of Jefferson’s time and energy. When Joseph C. Cabell proved unable to travel to Europe to hire the school’s first faculty, Jefferson and Madison decided to ask the attorney Francis W. Gilmer to undertake the task. Jefferson, Cabell, and their friends in the Virginia General Assembly labored long and hard in successful efforts to have the institution’s loans from the state’s Literary Fund turned into an outright grant, which they deemed of vital importance if the school was to open in a timely fashion, and, late in the 1823–24 legislative session, to obtain $50,000 in additional funding for the acquisition of books and scientific apparatus for the university. Jefferson was also intimately involved at this time in collecting information about how best to regulate and equip the institution, and in the ordering, transportation, and installation of the capitals for the pavilions and Rotunda.
Although incapacitated by a fever for three weeks during the summer of 1823, Jefferson still found time to design gymnasia for the University of Virginia, provide Cabell with a plan he had drawn up earlier for the construction of a new jail in Nelson County, and confer with Reverend Frederick W. Hatch about the building of Charlottesville’s first freestanding church. He wrote a letter to a namesake infant, Thomas Jefferson Grotjan, advising him to “Adore God. reverence and cherish your parents. love your neighbor as yourself; and your country more than life. be just. be true. murmur not at the ways of Providence, and the life into which you have entered will be the passage to one of eternal and ineffable bliss.” He described coffee to another correspondent as “the favorite beverage of the civilised world.” Lastly, Jefferson lamented the mid-September 1823 death of his son-in-law John Wayles Eppes, and he reassured John Adams that the publication of a collection of letters containing passages written by Adams critical of Jefferson would not impair their friendship.
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