Twilight at Monticello: The Final Years of Thomas Jefferson (Paperback)

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Key Phrases: sickness drought, hated occupations, Jeff Randolph, Poplar Forest, Tom Randolph (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Crawford (Unwise Passions: A True Story of a Remarkable Woman) does a thorough if artless job of narrating Thomas Jefferson's postpresidential years. Crawford's narrative is a slave to chronology, which works against him. The first 50 pages are a highly condensed account of his life up through his presidency: information which, if it must be included, could have been more elegantly inserted into the main narrative. After this false start, Crawford's story improves as he delivers an exhaustive account of Jefferson's tangled dotage: the attempted murder of his much-loved grandson by another relative, his dealings with other descendants both white and black; his de facto bankruptcy; and his late relations with such fellow founders as Adams and Madison. Much of this has been recounted before, though interesting and surprising details abound. For example, a young Edgar Allan Poe was at Jefferson's funeral. Despite all this diligence, however, Crawford's narrative regularly stops dead in its tracks, especially when the author crawls inside Jefferson's head, presuming to know his thoughts at a given moment. Crawford is quite sure, for example, that on the first day of February 1819, Jefferson dwelled upon the planters' financial plight, and his own... but this difficulty, Jefferson told himself, was surely temporary.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From The Washington Post

Reviewed by Michael Grunwald

How can you justify yet another book about a founding father?

If you're Joseph Ellis dissecting George Washington or David McCullough tackling John Adams, the answer isn't so hard: You're Joseph Ellis or David McCullough! But if you're anyone else, you'd better have an angle. You can (A) write new stuff about an obscure founder: How Charles Pinckney Saved America! Or you can (B) unveil a lesser-known aspect of a famous founder: John Adams, Meticulous Gardener! The only other option (C) is to recast old material with some counterintuitive spin: George Washington's Willing Executioners!

In Twilight at Monticello, Alan Pell Crawford has chosen option B, compiling a well-researched narrative of Thomas Jefferson's post-presidential years -- with a notable non-emphasis on the best-known aspect of those years, Jefferson's correspondence with Adams. Crawford deserves credit for focusing on less trampled ground and for shedding new light on Jefferson's dysfunctional family life and shopaholic tendencies. His tale is not gripping, but it is often revealing, and at times it smartly flirts with option C. Americans justifiably revere Jefferson for the Declaration of Independence, the Louisiana Purchase and his belief in religious freedom and popular democracy. But in Crawford's pages he comes off as an irresponsible, impractical, self-serving and self-deluded man who rarely lived up to his ideals.

Structurally, the book is a mess, starting with a rambling prologue that purports to recount the events of Feb. 1, 1819. Crawford doesn't have much documentation of that day, so he pads his narrative with dull conjecture about Jefferson's activities -- he might have been "singing softly to himself," because he did that sometimes -- along with discursive background about the painful boils on Jefferson's backside, the layout of Monticello's fields and gardens, Jefferson's views on slavery and banking, and so on. After 13 pages of additional digressions about cherry blossoms, telescopes, songbirds and classical texts, we finally learn the intriguing fact that on Feb. 1, 1819, Jefferson's grandson, Jeff Randolph, was stabbed by Charles Bankhead, the husband of Jefferson's granddaughter. But that's it for the prologue; Crawford then veers away from twilight to provide a misplaced, 50-page rehash of Jefferson's life before and during his presidency.

Crawford's story really begins in March 1809, when Jefferson leaves office, buys three dozen fancy chairs and returns home to Virginia. The rest of the book chronicles his last 17 years, a time of mounting debt, deteriorating health, agricultural fiascos, political maneuverings, architectural tinkerings, opiates and a variety of family tensions and tragedies. It is also the time when Jefferson renewed his memorable friendship with Adams and founded, designed and helped secure public funding for the University of Virginia, a triumph he included on his tombstone.

But Crawford mostly focuses on the relatively boring daily routine at Monticello. There's a lot about weather, thanks to Jefferson's meticulous meteorological records. Crops keep getting lost to frost or drought or hail or untimely rain. There are horseback rides and dinner parties. And then there is family life, full of illnesses, miscarriages, deaths and disputes, but not as exciting as Randolph's stabbing makes it sound. The 19th-century cast of The Jeffersons has a familiar feel: Bankhead is the drunk who causes everyone pain, Randolph the dutiful workhorse who has to sacrifice his education to try to rescue the family's mismanaged farms. And Jefferson is the manipulative patriarch who showers his brood with costly gifts purchased on credit, while undermining the other men in his house. Crawford unearths a devastating anecdote about Jefferson hanging Randolph's portrait in a second tier of paintings, below Adams, Franklin and Lafayette. "Had you been educated, you would have been entitled to a place in the first," Jefferson tells him. "You'll always occupy the second."

There's also a lot about Jefferson's chaotic finances, partly because Jefferson meticulously documented them as well, partly because they reveal one of the least flattering facets of Jefferson, who was certainly a deadbeat and arguably a swindler. He was generous with other people's money, spoiling his grandkids with guitars and silk dresses while stiffing his creditors; his will directed the purchase of five new gold watches for bequests despite his massive debts. He also spent lavishly on elegant clothing, immaculately groomed horses and expensive books for himself. There is something endearing about his ridiculous plan to achieve financial independence for his heirs by building them a grandiose Palladian home; the roof leaked, and he forgot to build stairways to connect the lower level to the main floor. But there is no way to defend his shakedown of his friend Philip Mazzei, a Florentine horticulturalist who trusted Jefferson to oversee his American holdings, only to find out that the Sage of Monticello had sold them and loaned himself the proceeds to continue his architectural experiments.

In his final years, Jefferson tried to bail out his heirs by persuading Virginia's politicians to create a public lottery for his benefit, a scheme that violated his stated principles. (It didn't happen, so his heirs inherited his debts, and most of his slaves were sold to help pay them.) Crawford reminds us that Jefferson constantly violated his stated principles, most notoriously by owning slaves, advising others to keep slaves and supporting the extension of slavery into U.S. territories while supposedly loathing slavery. Of course, Jefferson's stated principles are what made him so important; many of them became America's principles. And Jefferson wasn't the only American who failed to live up to them.

But he sure didn't. Crawford connects the dots by portraying Jefferson as a failed idealist who preferred theory to practice, maintaining a constant state of denial that allowed him to denounce partisanship, political intrigue and fiscal irresponsibility as well as slaveholding with genuine vehemence in his public life while practicing them all with vigor in his private life. It's a polite way of saying that Jefferson lived in a dream world, a world where man's interests and duties miraculously coincided, where enlightened agricultural and architectural theories were correct regardless of miserable yields or leaking roofs, where no one dared to point out that Sally Hemings's children looked an awful lot like Thomas Jefferson.

There's a less polite way to say this: The guy on the nickel was a hypocrite. This became especially clear after his public life was over. We should celebrate Jefferson's enduring ideals, but this book reminds us that there's no need to whitewash his reality.

Copyright 2008, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 352 pages
• Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks; Reprint edition (February 10, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0812969464
• ISBN-13: 978-0812969467
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.2 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (37 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #37,670 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

30 of 33 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Jefferson's Retirement Years, January 18, 2008

By	Ronald H. Clark (WASHINGTON, DC USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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This review is from: Twilight at Monticello: The Final Years of Thomas Jefferson (Hardcover)

I found this recent study to nicely complement the standard book on this topic, Dumas Malone's concluding volume to his magisterial "Jefferson and his Time" series, "The Sage of Monticello" (1981). The book benefits from intervening research on TJ, including perhaps some additional documentary sources. The author has held a residential fellowship at one of the leading resources for Jeffersonian research, the International Center for Jefferson Studies situated near Monticello. However, the tone of the two books is somewhat different. Malone's title foretells the Sage returning home in retirement, to his books, family and farms, while he shapes the creation of the University of Virginia and continues to disseminate political wisdom. By contrast, Crawford's title , "Twilight at Monticello," suggests a less happy period for the retired President. The cover has a picture of Monticello in decay, somewhat after TJ's death. And many of the chapters are devoted to unfortunate and unpleasant events that afflicted TJ during his retirement. While the author's research is impressive, as reflected in 40 pages of helpful notes, he manages to cover the topic in 300 or so pages, as compared with Malone's exhaustive 537-page treatment. The author also brings to bear a more critical tone in assessing Jefferson during this period than Malone, who was (in addition to being a fine historian) distinctively a founding member of the Jefferson Establishment, centered at UVA, which undertook as much veneration of TJ as critical analysis of the third President. Jefferson is truly a complex and maddingly inconsistent figure; that is why solid studies such as this are so interesting to read. The author is to be commended for packing a lot of information into a relatively compact treatment--and Malone always awaits those who want to study the topic in greater detail.

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The Complex Mr. Jefferson, February 4, 2008

By	Mark R. Brewer "Mark R. Brewer" (Pitman, NJ USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Twilight at Monticello: The Final Years of Thomas Jefferson (Hardcover)

Twilight At Monticello is an intelligent, well-written, well-researched book that is certainly well worth reading. It examines Thomas Jefferson's last years, from the time he left the Presidency in 1809, until his death in 1826.
Jefferson remains a complex and often contradictory character. He professed to hate slavery, yet he kept slaves throughout his life and freed a mere handful in his will. It's pretty certain he had children with a slave named Sally Hemings. Sally was forty years Jefferson's junior, and she may have been the half-sister of Jefferson's deceased wife. Crawford's book includes an excellent chapter on this relationship.
Jefferson was also irresponsible in his spending habits, and left a debt so huge at his death that Monticello and its lands and slaves had to be sold to help pay it off. Crawford offers an insightful examination on this aspect of Jefferson's character.
On a couple of issues, however, Mr. Crawford comes up short. In discussing the Presidential election of 1800, Crawford admits that Jefferson "discreetly approved . . . attacks on . . . Adams"(p.30). But Crawford downplays Jefferson's backstabbing of his old friend John Adams. Both parties ran nasty campaigns, but Jefferson personally hired a newspaperman, the notorious James Callender, to write lies about his friend. Adams never stooped to such depths. But Jefferson could be two-faced, a fact that George Washington learned over time. John Adams learned it too. This is an important trait of Jefferson's and it deserves more attention than Crawford gives it.
Concerning this same election, Crawford writes, "Jefferson proved immensely more popular than Adams . . . "(p.83). The truth is, were it not for the Three-fifths Compromise, which gave the South additional electors because of their slave population, John Adams would have won the Election of 1800, a point Crawford certainly should have noted.
The Louisiana Purchase and the subsequent Lewis and Clark Expedition were certainly the highlights of Jefferson's presidency, and Crawford appropriately devotes some ink to both. But he makes no mention of Jefferson's lost opportunity to eliminate slavery from Louisiana, which Jefferson could have done. Historian Joseph J. Ellis calls this Jefferson's "greatest failing."
There are also a number of mistakes in Crawford's book. Writing about the autumn of 1819, Crawford says, "Twenty years earlier, when Jefferson first became active in the American Philosophical Society, his circle included such first-rate minds as Benjamin Franklin . . ."(p. 182). But twenty years before 1819 -- in 1799 -- Franklin had already been dead for nine years.
Another sentence from Crawford reads, "Perhaps a February 17, 1825 letter to James Madison, written six months before Jefferson's death . . ."(p.196). In this case, Crawford has Jefferson dying in August of 1825, not in July of 1826, which is when Jefferson actually departed this life.
John Adams, of course, died the same day as Jefferson, on July 4, 1826, as Crawford writes, "at ninety-one" (p.141). Adams, born in October, 1735, was ninety at his death, more than three months shy of ninety-one.
These are, perhaps, trivial mistakes, but Crawford is the author and therefore the expert. He should get his facts straight.
Despite these shortcomings, Twilight At Monticello is a worthwhile read. It will introduce some to the complex Mr. Jefferson. To those already familiar with Jefferson's inconsistent character, it will add to your frustration.

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Jefferson's Not-so-golden years ... , March 15, 2008

By	Kevin Quinley "GeezerJock" (Fairfax, VA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Twilight at Monticello: The Final Years of Thomas Jefferson (Hardcover)

Author Alan Pell Crawford paints a rather grim portrait of the post-presidential years of the life of Thomas Jefferson. This is not an expose or a hatchet job on the founding father, though. One learns that - like all humans - Jefferson had his flaws and his own personal and family struggles.

Family strife abounded in the Jefferson household. In addition, Jefferson was not an astute money manager of his personal finances. His indebtedness weighed and preyed upon him heavier and heavier as his longevity extended. Monticello was a rather high-maintenance and uncomfortable place to live.

Interestingly, Crawford does seem to weigh in on the side of those historians who think that Jefferson had a black mistress in the form of Sally Hemmings.

Again, though, this is not a scandalous book or an attempt to show that Jefferson had feet of clay. For those who seek a glimpse of Jefferson the man, it will perhaps be comforting to know that he was human just like all of us and struggled with many of life's common challenges and temptations.