"Three Grand & Interesting Objects"
Notes
1. For Jefferson's relationship with Smith and his newspaper, see William E. Ames's A History of the National Intelligencer (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1972).
2. For the Smiths' visit to Monticello and Montpelier in 1809 and for some wonderful anecdotes surrounding Jefferson and Madison, see Gaillard Hunt's selection of Margaret Bayard Smith's letters, The First Forty Years of Washington Society (New York, 1906).
3. Joel W. Brown's Central Hotel stood directly across from the court house. It is bounded today by Main, East Fifth, East Fourth, and Market streets.
4. The date of the sale was Monday, 4 Aug. 1828. In July the Bank of the United States had offered for sale 2,800 acres of land, the residue of some 5,433 acres of Albemarle County land once held by Monroe. The property included part of the Highland tract on which stood a dwelling, grist and saw mills, and a 705 acre tract below Milton on Lime Stone Creek. See Newton B. Jones, "Albemarle's Support of the Claims of James Monroe, 1828–1829," in The Papers of the Albemarle County Historical Society, 11 (1950–51), 45–46.
Nicholas Biddle (1786–1844) of Philadelphia, a close friend of Monroe, was president of the bank from 1822 to 1839, when he retired to Andalusia, his country seat in Delaware.
5. Haywood, the retreat of George Washington's nephew, William Augustine Washington (1757–1810), was built in 1783 on the Wakefield Plantation in Westmoreland County, Virginia.
6. The "Steam Boat and Stage Line" left Washington daily at noon and arrived in Richmond twenty-six hours later. An advertisement in the National Intelligencer and Washington Advertiser dated 12 Aug. 1828 indicates the cost of a ticket to Fredericksburg was $3.75, with "Carriage and Horses, and Freight, taken at moderate prices."
7. Several turnpikes ran through Albemarle County by 1828. The Smiths used a route that joined the county's northeastern residents with those of Orange County by a road running southwesterly from Fredericksburg to Orange, Gordonsville, and Castle Hill, to near Monticello, and crossed by a turnpike at a point northeast of Charlottesville that followed the Rivanna River into Charlottesville. For a discussion of Albemarle's "execrable" roads, see William Minor Dabney, "Jefferson's Albemarle: History of Albemarle County, Virginia, 1727–1819" (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Virginia, 1951), 150–56).
8. Thomas Jefferson Randolph (Jeff; 1792–1875), the son of Martha Jefferson and Thomas Mann Randolph, Jr., married Jane Hollins Nicholas (1798–1871) of Mount Warren on 6 March 1815. They lived at Edgehill and had seven daughters.
9. William Meade (1789–1862), who later became the third Episcopal bishop of Virginia and published Old Churches, Ministers, and Families of Virginia (2 vols. 1857), preached at Christ Episcopal Church on 3 August. A description of Meade's visit to Christ Church in 1829 can be found in R. T. W. Duke, Jr.'s Christ Church in Early Days (Charlottesville, 1895), 5. Meade's son, Richard Kidder Meade, served from 1836 to 1868 as the rector of Christ Church, a Jeffersonian styled red brick building with white columns that had been consecrated in 1826 as Charlottesville's first religious structure.
10. Hugh Nelson (1768–1836), a close friend of Jefferson and Monroe, was minister to Spain from 1823 to 1825. He moved from his native York County to Albemarle and served in Congress as a Republican from 1811 to 1823. Nelson was a conspicuous supporter among Monroe's Albemarle County friends who began in late 1828 to "awaken the sympathies of generous minds" to the ex-president's financial claims against the United States government in connection with his two missions to France. See Jones, "Albemarle's Support of the Claims of James Monroe, 1828–1829," in The Papers of the Albemarle County Historical Society, 11 (1950–51), 46, 47.
11. Jefferson's academical village actually has only ten pavilions. Perhaps Smith's perspective included the two hotels at the south end of the east and west ranges.
12. JohnTayloe Lomax (1781–1862) of Caroline County, Va., was a Fredericksburg attorney who became the university's first professor of law in 1826. He resigned in 1830 to sit on the bench of the state circuit court at Fredericksburg.
13. William Wirt (1772–1834) of Bladensburg, Md., practiced law in Virginia. He became famous for his defense of James T. Callender under the alien and sedition acts and for his prosecution of Aaron Burr for treason. He served as attorney general from 1817 to 1829 and reluctantly stood as the anti-Mason candidate for president in 1832. Wirt declined Jefferson's offer to become the first law professor and president of the University of Virginia.
14. The observatory was located at the top of a small mountain dubbed Observatory Hill, one and one-half miles west of the university.
15. William Cabell Rives (1793–1868) of Nelson County, who served in the House of Representatives, the Senate, and as minister to France, represented Nelson and Albemarle counties in the House of Delegates. He strongly supported the bill creating the University of Virginia and was a member of its board of visitors for many years. Rives married Judith Page Walker of Castle Hill in March 1819.
16. Philip Pendleton Barbour (1783–1841) of Frascati, in Orange County, served in Congress from 1814 to 1825. He presided over the Virginia Constitutional Convention in 1829–30 and and in 1826 President Andrew Jackson appointed him to the Supreme Court, where he served until his death. Barbour's older brother James was a close friend of the Smith family.
17. Sidney was the Smith's 200 acre country retreat in Maryland, which they bought in 1804. Its previous name was Turkey Thicket, and it later became part of the grounds of Catholic University. It was "a neat little box they have a few miles from the city," according to Jefferson, and "Mrs. S. H. Smith is always at her country house" (see Jefferson to Ellen Wayles Randolph, 28 June 1805, and Jefferson to Anne Cary Randolph, 29 June 1806, in Edwin Morris Betts and James Adam Bear, eds., The Family Letters of Thomas Jefferson, (Charlottesville, 1989), 274, 286).
18. Chapman Johnson (1779–1849), a Louisa County lawyer and legislator, was an original member of the University of Virginia's board of visitors. Johnson served in the Virginia Senate from 1815 to 1831 and he championed the rising western section of Virginia against the older aristocratic eastern counties in the 1829–30 Virginia Constitutional Convention.
19. For more complete accounts of this often-recounted incident of 1 Oct. 1825, see Jefferson to Joseph Coolidge, Jr., 13 Oct. 1825, in the Jefferson Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society, Dumas Malone, The Sage of Monticello, (Jefferson and His Time, v. 6, Boston, 1977, 1981), 465–67, and Philip Alexander Bruce, The Lengthened Shadow of One Man, (History of the University of Virginia, 1819–1919, New York, 1920), 2:298–301. Of the fourteen students involved only three actually were expelled, including a grand-nephew of Jefferson, nor did the students' unruly behavior cease with the incident (see Malone, Sage of Monticello, 483–84). Smith's figure of twenty or more is accurate for the total number expelled from the university by the time of her visit, however.
20. Jefferson is buried between his wife, Martha Wayles Skelton (1748–1782), and their second daughter, Mary (1778–1804), often called Polly and Maria.
21. Martha Jefferson Randolph (1772–1836), Jefferson's daughter and the wife of Thomas Mann Randolph, Jr. (1768–1828), ran the Monticello household during her father's retirement and declining years. She inherited the encumbered estate in a trust.
22. A list of Martha Jefferson's eleven children that survived infancy can be found in Betts and Bear, The Family Letters of Thomas Jefferson, 15.
23. Nicholas P. Trist (1800–1874) married Jefferson's granddaughter Virginia Jefferson Randolph (1801–1882) and served the university in the capacity of secretary to the faculty and board of visitors. Trist, who was one of the trustees of Jefferson's estate and who became an assistant secretary of state, served as a diplomat to Cuba from 1833 to 1841. Eliza House (Mrs. Nicholas) Trist had been a friend of Jefferson since 1772 when he had boarded with her mother, Mary House, in Philadelphia.
24. George Wythe Randolph (1818–1867) attended school in Boston.
25. Monticello was advertised for sale in 1828 but not sold until 1831. By that time Martha Jefferson Randolph was living in Washington.
26. Martha Jefferson Randolph moved with her family to Washington after Monticello was sold (see Margaret Bayard Smith to Jane Bayard Kirkpatrick, 27 Nov., 27 Dec. 1829, and 26 Jan. 1830, in the Margaret Bayard Smith Papers, Library of Congress.
27. James Madison Randolph (1806–1834) lived and worked at Edgehill with his oldest brother, Thomas Jefferson Randolph.
28. Montpelier, in Orange County, was in pristine condition at the time of the Smiths's visit. Beginning in 1809 Madison enlisted the help of William Thornton and Benjamin Latrobe in enlarging the home his father built between 1756 and 1760 and employed James Dinsmore and John Neilson, Jefferson's master craftsmen at Monticello and the University of Virginia, to do the work.
29. The identity of these persons remains elusive, although one of the three might have been Sir Charles Bagot (1781–1843), the British plenipotentiary at Washington from 1816 to 1819, who was responsible for the Rush-Bagot agreement of 1818 that led to the disarmament of the Great Lakes. Bagot corresponded with Madison in August and September 1817 about visiting Montpelier.
30. Nelly Conway Madison (1732–1829) married James Madison, Sr. (1723–1801), in 1749 and lived at Montpelier until her death.
31. Margaret and Samuel had three daughters and a son: Julia Harrison (b. 1801), Susan Harrison (b. 1804), Jonathan Bayard Harrison (b. 1810), and Anna Maria Harrison (b. 1811), who accompanied her parents on this trip to Albemarle. Anna Maria Brodeau Thornton (1775–1865), born in France and married to William B. Thornton (1759–1828) who designed the capitol in Washington and Pavilion VII at the university; and Clara Barlow Bomford, wife of George Bomford (1782–1848) of New York, the country's greatest ordnance expert. The Bomfords lived at Kalorama, the Joel Barlow estate on the outskirts of Washington.