For most American men, retirement is a time of rest, reflection and maybe a few extra rounds of golf.
For former U.S. President Thomas Jefferson, the years from 1809, when he left the White House, to his death in 1826 were filled with intense intellectual activity, including correspondence with great thinkers and statesmen of his time and founding the University.
Now these years are the subject of an ambitious scholarly project begun last year by the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation of Charlottesville. Thomas Jefferson: The Retirement Series will comprise Jefferson's papers and letters, incoming and outgoing, from that period, when he took up permanent residence at Monticello.
"I find Jefferson endlessly fascinating," said J. Jefferson Looney, editor of the papers. In retirement, "he is liberated from the burdens of public office [and] he has more time to devote to his many interests."
"He also doesn't have to be as cautious because he is not a politician anymore," Looney said.
The planned 23-volume set will be published by Princeton University Press, where Jefferson's papers have been collected since 1940. Since 1950, it has published 28 chronological volumes of letters and papers from Jefferson's early life and career.
A significant aid to accomplishing the enormous task Looney and his staff of ten researchers face is a journal in which Jefferson logged the letters he sent and received each day. Jefferson also used a polygraph machine of his own design to create a copy of each letter he wrote, which he retained for his own records.
The manuscripts are collected from nearly 1,000 sources, including private collections and autograph dealers as well as extensive collections in the Library of Congress, the Massachusetts Historical Society and the University.
The first volume of the Retirement Series is slated for publication in 2004, and the project is scheduled for completion in 25 years.
It will include his lengthy and erudite correspondence with fellow U.S. Presidents John Adams and James Madison and other letters with scholars and educated amateurs in his fields of interest, which stretched from agriculture and architecture to Native American history.
Much of Jefferson's later life was devoted to founding the University, which he listed along with the authorship of the Declaration of Independence and the Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom on his gravestone at Monticello.
"The Series will contain all of the correspondence and papers related to the founding of the University of Virginia," Looney said. "It is the one public project which engaged him during his life since leaving the Presidency and is one of the most important."
Jefferson carefully planned the University, designing the buildings and Grounds of the Academical Village and planning the curriculum. He often supervised its construction from Monticello using a spyglass.
"Since founding the University was one of Jefferson's hobbies in retirement, the University has a great interest in the publication of a definitive edition of Jefferson's papers from that period," said J.C.A. Stagg, history professor and editor of the papers of James Madison.
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