"Three Grand & Interesting Objects"

Notes

1. Martin Boyd Coyner, Jr., "John Hartwell Cocke of Bremo: Agriculture and Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Virginia, 1961), 75.

2. This characterization of John, Jr., is taken from J. L. Urbach's "God and Man in the Life of Louisa Maxwell Holmes Cocke: A Search for Piety and Place in the Old South" (Ph.D. dissertation, Florida State University, 1983), 324–25, 348, 359, 380, 286, 379–92. Although Louisa considered him a "hopeless case" and his illness to be a "real Satanic possession," John was occasionally allowed to lead family devotions (ibid., 348, 391). John Hartwell Cocke's first grandson, Hartwell, the son of John, Jr.'s sister Nan and her husband Frank Cabell, also was afflicted with epilepsy.

3. Jefferson to Cocke, 3 May, 1819, Cocke Family Papers, University of Virginia Archives, Alderman Library, Charlottesville (hereafter cited as ViU:JHC), and Cocke to Jefferson, 4 May 1819, Jefferson Papers, Huntington Library, San Marino California. Jefferson's old friend Thomas Cooper recruited Stack in Philadelphia during the spring of 1819. "I consider him as well qualified as any fresh imported tutor you are likely to procure from Europe, for the higher Situation," Cooper informed Jefferson, "and not the worse for having spent a year or two in this country" (Cooper to Jefferson, 11 April, Jefferson Papers, University of Virginia Archives, hereafter cited as ViU:TJ). A former female academy in Charlottesville was procured for the school, and Stack left Philadelphia for Charlottesville on 16 April (see Cooper to Jefferson, 15 April, in ViU:TJ).

4. See Jefferson to Cary, 4 May, and Cary to Jefferson, 7 May, in Carr-Cary Papers, University of Virginia Archives.

5. Jefferson to Cocke, 7 July, in ViU:JHC, and Jefferson to James Breckenridge, Robert Taylor, James Madison, and Chapman Johnson, 8–26 July 1819, in ViU:TJ. The tuition for students to study ancient languages at Stack's grammar school was $30 for a one-year term, and board at Laporte's was estimated to cost $120 a year. The students were given a one-month vacation in the fall.

6. See Alexander Garrett to Cocke, 4 June 1819, in ViU:JHC, and Cocke to Brockenbrough, 9 October, in University of Virginia Proctors Papers, University of Virginia Archives (hereafter cited as ViU:PP).

7. See Stack to Jefferson, 21, 24 November 1819, in Jefferson Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, Jefferson to Stack, 25 November 1819, in Jefferson Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., and Jefferson to John Wayles Eppes, 30 June, and 29 July 1820, in ViU:TJ, and Browse Trist to Nicholas Trist, 13 October 1820, in Trist Papers, Library of Congress; see also Dumas Malone's The Sage of Monticello, 371–73, 379.

8. For the Raggi brothers, see William B. O'Neal, "Michele and Giacomo Raggi at the University of Virginia: With Notes and Documents," in the Magazine, 18 (1959–1960), 5–31.

9. This kiln and brickyard was erected in July 1819, apparently somewhere on the steep eastern side of the university. On 2 July Jefferson informed university proctor Arthur Spicer Brockenbrough that "the Philadelphia workmen will need your presence also for a short time to set them to work, point out the place for their brickyard and other particulars better known to you than myself" (ViU:PP).

10. Frank E. Grizzard, Jr., "Documentary History of the Construction of the Buildings at the University of Virginia, 1817–1828" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Virginia, 1996). This dissertation is an electronic database which can accessed via the World-Wide Web at http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/grizzard/.

11. These buildings are on the East Lawn. On 25 September the younger Cocke wrote his father again, informing him that "I have not been able to go up to the University since I recieved your last Cas the weather has been very bad ever since and therefore I can't answer you's with respect to the things which I omitted before" (ViU:JHC).