Free America's Obsessives: The Compulsive Energy That Built a Nation by Joshua Kendall Page B

opponent, Charles Pinckney of South Carolina, got only 14. However, in his second term, Jefferson was hamstrung by developments abroad. Hoping to stay out of the protracted war between Britain and France, Jefferson pushed through Congress the Embargo Act of 1807, which banned all international trade. “The idea of ceasing intercourse with obnoxious nations,” Henry Adams has noted, “reflected his own personality in the mirror of statesmanship.” Though the loner managed to get both the hated King George and Napoleon out of his face, the U.S. economy suffered terribly. Jefferson’s personal life also took a turn for the worse after the death of his younger daughter, Polly, in childbirth in 1804. “My evening prospects,” the heartbroken and depressed president wrote that year, alluding to his only surviving child, “now hang on the slender thread of a single life.”
    Fortunately for Jefferson, Martha remained much more devoted to him than to her husband, Thomas Randolph, then a congressman from Virginia, with whom she would have a total of twelve children. “The first and most important object with me,” Martha reassured her father in 1807, “will be the dear and sacred duty of nursing and cheering your old age.” After Jefferson’s retirement, Martha, having already separated from the mentally unstable Randolph, would move with the children to Monticello, where she would also raise her sister’s sole surviving child.
      
    “Never did a prisoner,” wrote the sixty-five-year-old Jefferson a couple of days before the end of his second term, “feel such relief as I shall on shaking off the shackles of power.” No longer weighed down by pressing political responsibilities, the self-described “hermit of Monticello” began “enjoying a species of happiness that I never before knew, that of doing whatever hits the humor of the moment.” For Jefferson, spontaneous fun meant immersion in one project after another designed to bring more order into his world. Some would be of minimal significance to posterity, but others of considerable. While he may not have been our most productive ex-president—a designation often accorded to Jimmy Carter—he may well have been our most industrious, most neat, and most devoted to the cause of organization.
    Gardening was high on his agenda. For years, Jefferson had collected seeds from all over the world, which he stored in “little phials, labeled and hung on little hooks…in the neatest order,” according to one visitor to Monticello, and he was eager to see what he could grow. A week after returning home from Washington, he started a massive eight-column “Kalendar” in his Garden Book, in which he tracked the hundreds of vegetables that he planted that spring and summer. (Though no subsequent “Kalendar” would be quite as long, Jefferson would compile one every year until 1825.) Applying his characteristic thoroughness, he kept experimenting and refining his methods. When the Roman broccoli which he had first sowed on April 20, 1809, “failed nearly,” the recently retired president didn’t give up; he tried again on May 30 and June 3, and eventually managed to transplant a total of 135 broccoli plants on July 10. “Under a total want of demand except for our family table,” Jefferson wrote a friend in 1811, “I am still devoted to the garden. But though an old man, I am but a young gardener.” He also laid out shrubs and filled in the flower beds that surrounded his house. While Sally’s nephew, his slave Wormley, did the digging, Jefferson trailed behind with his measuring line and pruning knife in order to keep the rows properly aligned. In so doing, Jefferson was paying homage to his obsessive father, who had organized Shadwell’s vegetable and flower gardens in numbered beds ordered in rows designated by letters.
    In March 1815, Jefferson began labeling and organizing his books one last time. Six months earlier, after hearing that the Brits had