Good afternoon!
My name is Kurt Smith, and I portray Thomas
Jefferson for Colonial Williamsburg.
Today we're going to take you on a journey.
A journey through Jefferson's letters.
But not the letters you might think of.
The man wrote a lot of letters.
20,000 letters!
Twenty.
Thousand.
Letters.
The man wouldn't stop.
He was a machine.
Here are seventeen volumes of Jefferson's
letters and seventeen volumes only gets us
up to 1790.
The man still had decades of public service
left.
He wouldn't stop!
(There's my wig.)
His memorandum books hold a key insight into
the mundane daily life of Thomas Jefferson.
His memorandum books note things, like monies
coming into and out of his accounts.
He take the temperature several times a day.
He notes which flowers are in bloom, which
birds are flocking, and in what direction.
His memorandum books, these tiny details written
in quiet solitude, might hold great insight.
Not into Jefferson, the letter writer, but
rather Jefferson, the human.
And now it's time for a snapshot with Thomas
Jefferson.
Not that one.
Not that one either.
There we go.
Thomas Jefferson was a naturalist at heart
and this included paying occasionally to see
animals that he found great curiosity in.
Including one time in 1768, April 1778, he
paid for seeing an elk.
April 11, 1769, he paid for seeing a hog that
weighed more than 1,050 pounds.
November 7, 1769, he paid for seeing a great
hog.
It was the exact same hog that he had paid
to see earlier.
November 16, 1771, he paid for seeing an alligator
and June 1, 1776 Thomas Jefferson paid to
see a monkey.
One shilling in fact.
That's not a very expensive monkey.
Paid seven dollars for the elk.
Other times, there was cake.
Like this notation in September of 69, he
says quote "gave a woman to buy cakes, five
shillings" and on the same day, I kid you
not, and I quote "gave a woman to buy cakes
seven and a half dollars."
Now the editors of the Jefferson memorandum
books suggest that there's a correlation between
local elections and these cake purchases that
exist in Jefferson's memorandum books.
To corroborate this, Jefferson's fee book
also says, on September 21, 1769, "buy cakes
at election, two pounds, five shillings."
And on another quote he says "paid John Coleman
for wine at election."
He might very well have supplies both cakes
and alcohol at his elections and that is,
friends, a tradition we should consider bringing
back.
What's the grand takeaway?
If you want to read about Jefferson, the human,
the Jefferson that lived at times a quiet,
tiny, mundane life, there's no better source
to go to than Jefferson's memorandum books,
his daily accounts of his daily life.
Sometimes his life was extraordinary.
At other times, he writes about buying a toothpick.
Sometimes there was death and sadness.
Sometimes there was cake.
And one time, Thomas Jefferson paid to see
a monkey.
