Jefferson in His Own Time: A Biographical Chronicle of His Life, Drawn from Recollections, Interviews, and Memoirs by Family, Friends, and Associates

A Visionary Who Loved to Dream Eyes Wide Open(1841)

[128] kkk [A Visionary Who Loved to Dream Eyes Wide Open] (1841) Augustus J. Foster A career diplomat, Augustus J. Foster (1780–1848) was educated at Christ Church, Oxford. After college he traveled through Europe, getting to know such literary figures as Goethe, Schiller, and Madame de Staël, among many other prominent people. Appointed secretary of the legation at Washington, D.C. in 1804, he reached America in December of that year and stayed until 1808. When Congress was not in session, Foster traveled around the United States. In 1807 his travels brought him to Monticello, a visit he recorded in detail. After serving as chargé d’affaires at Stockholm from 1808 through 1810, Foster came back to the United States as minister plenipotentiary in Washington, D.C., but he could do little to prevent the War of 1812. He returned to Great Britain in 1812 and later served as minister plenipotentiary at Copenhagen from 1814 to 1824 and at Turin from 1825 to 1840. Foster’s Notes on the United States came into being when, in the words of Richard Beale Davis, “a British diplomat in his mid-fifties decided that he must have his say about the America he had known as a young man” (Jeffersonian America, ix). Drawing upon his travel notes, Foster composed a first draft of the work in the mid 1830s. He tinkered with his text for the remainder of the decade, bringing it near enough to completion that he gave John Gibson Lockhart, editor of the Quarterly Review, a copy of the manuscript. Lockhart reviewed the manuscript as if it were a published work, but his critical comments are limited to brief remarks interspersed between big chunks of text from Foster’s manuscript. Lockhart’s review essentially constitutes the first published edition of Notes on the United States. For the Quarterly Review, Lockhart quoted much of Foster’s impressions of Thomas Jefferson, adding only one interpretive comment of his own. After quoting Foster’s description of a newly invented odometer Jefferson used on his carriage, Lockhart observed: [129] the house has two porticoes of the Doric order, though one of them was not quite completed, and the pediment had, in the meanwhile, to be supported on the stems of four tulip-trees, which are really, when well grown, as beautiful as the fluted shafts of Corinthian pillars. They front north and south: on the ground-floor were four sitting-rooms, two bed-rooms, and the library, which contained several thousand volumes, classed according to subject and language. It was divided into three compartments, in one of which the president had his bed placed in a doorway; and in a recess at the foot of the bed was a horse with forty-eight projecting hands, on which hung his coats and waistcoats, and which he could turn round with a long stick,—a nick-nack that Jefferson was fond of showing, with many other little mechanical inventions; one of which was a sulky upon four wheels, with the spring in the centre, a very rough sort of carriage, but which he preferred to any other, as having been made by an Irish mechanic at MontiJefferson ’s printed correspondence is full of allusions to polygraphs, and pantographs, and so forth. “I have always observed,” says Sir Walter Scott, “that a small taste for mechanics tends to encouraging a sort of trifling self-conceit, founded on knowing what is not worth being known by one who has other matters to employ his mind on, and, in short, forms a trumpery gimcrack kind of a character.”—Letter to Miss Joanna Baillie, Life of Scott, vol. vi. p. 83. Lockhart’s criticism of Jefferson seems petty, but his words reinforce the in- fluence of Thomas Jefferson Randolph’s four-volume edition of his grandfather ’s writings, which was reprinted in London in 1829 as Memoirs, Correspondence , and Private Papers of Thomas Jefferson. After his retirement from the diplomatic corps, Foster revised his manuscript further, but he was never sufficiently satisfied with it to see it into press and left it unpublished at the time of his death. On 1 August 1848, in a fit of temporary insanity, Foster slit his throat. Notes on the United States remained unpublished until 1954, when Richard Beale Davis issued a scholarly edition of the work. Since Davis’s edition is readily available, the Monticello section is presented here as John Gibson Lockhart originally presented it for the readers...