... observed the march of civilization advancing from the sea coast, passing over us like a cloud of light, increasing our knowledge and improving our condition, insomuch as that we are at that time more advanced in civilization here than the seaports were when I was a boy. And where this progress will stop no one can say. Barbarism has, in the meantime, been receding before the steady step of amelioration; and will in time, I trust, disappear from the earth.[576]
Scarcely two weeks before he died—and this is practically his last important utterance—he recalled in a letter to the citizens of the city of Washington who had invited him to attend the celebration held for the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, how proud he was that his fellow citizens, after fifty years, continued to approve the choice made when the Declaration was adopted. "May it be to the world," he added, "what I believe it will (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all) the signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government."[577]
This faith in the ultimate recognition of the ideals, which he had defined with such a felicity of expression half a century earlier, was, even more than any belief in personal immortality, "the rocket" that John Adams thought so necessary to attach us to this life. It was a real religion, the religion of progress, of the eighteenth century which had its devotees and with Condorcet its martyr. Strengthened by the intimate conviction that he would be judged from his acts and not "from his words", he saw the approach of Death without any qualms, and he turned back to his old friends of Greece and Rome, for "the classic pages fill up the vacuum of ennui, and become sweet composers to that rest of the grave into which we are sooner or later to descend."[578] On many occasions he expressed his readiness to depart: "I enjoy good health," he wrote once to John Adams; "I am happy in what is around me, yet I assure you I am ripe for leaving all, this year, this day, this hour."[579] It took almost ten years after these lines were written for the call to come. Most of his biographers have dealt extensively with the remarkable vigor preserved by Jefferson even to his last day. For several years after his retirement he remained a hale and robust old man. But he felt none the less the approaching dissolution and watched anxiously the slow progress of his physical limitations. His letters do not completely bear out on this point the statement made by Mrs. Sarah Randolph in her "Domestic Life of Thomas Jefferson."
At seventy-three he was still remarkably robust and, with the minuteness of a physician, described his case in a letter to his old friend Charles Thomson:
I retain good health, am rather feeble to walk much, but ride with ease, passing two or three hours a day on horseback.... My eyes need the aid of glasses by night, and with small print in the day also; my hearing is not quite so sensible as it used to be; no tooth shaking yet, but shivering and shrinking in body from the cold we now experience; my thermometer having been as low as 12° this morning. My greatest oppression is a correspondence afflictingly laborious, the extent of which I have been long endeavoring to curtail. Could I reduce this epistolary corvée within the limits of my friends and affairs ... my life would be as happy as the infirmities of age would admit, and I should look on its consummation with the composure of one "qui summum nec metuit diem nec optat."[580]
This remarkable preservation of his faculties he attributed largely to his abstemious diet. For years he had eaten little animal food, and that "not as an aliment so much as a condiment for the vegetables", which constituted his principal diet. "I double however the Doctor's glass and a half of wine, and even treble it with a friend, but halve its effects by drinking the weak wines only. The ardent wines I cannot drink, nor do I use ardent spirits in any form."[581]
Yet he had to admit to Mrs. Trist in 1814 that he was only "an old half-strung fiddle",[582] and as he advanced in age the "machine" gave evident signs of wearing out. The recurrence of the suffering caused by his broken wrist, badly set in Paris by the famous Louis,[583] and still worse the very painful "disury" with which he was afflicted[584] gave him many unhappy hours. To die was nothing, for as he wrote then in his old "Commonplace Book", "I do not worry about the hereafter, even if now the doom of death stands at my feet, for we are men and cannot live forever. To all of us death must happen."[585] But "bodily decay" was "gloomy in prospect, for of all human contemplation the most abhorrent is a body without mind. To be a doting old man, to repeat four times over the same story in one hour", if this was life, it was "at most the life of a cabbage."[586] He was spared this affliction he dreaded so much, and when Lafayette visited him in November, 1824, the Marquis found him "much aged without doubt, after a separation of thirty-five years, but bearing marvelously well under his eighty-one years of age, in full possession of all the vigor of his mind and heart."[587] Six months later, when Lafayette took his final leave, Jefferson was weaker and confined to his house, suffering much "with one foot in the grave and the other one uplifted to follow it."
Death was slowly approaching, without any particular disease being noticeable; after running for eighty-three years "the machine" was about to "surcease motion." The end has been told by several contemporaries and friends. No account is more simple and more touching in its simplicity than the relation written by his attending physician, Doctor Dunglison:
Until the 2d. and 3d. of July he spoke freely of his approaching death; made all arrangements with his grandson, Mr. Randolph, in regard to his private affairs; and expressed his anxiety for the prosperity of the University and his confidence in the exertion in its behalf of Mr. Madison and the other visitors. He repeatedly, too, mentioned his obligation to me for my attention to him. During the last week of his existence I remained at Monticello; and one of the last remarks he made was to me. In the course of the day and night of the 2d of July he was affected with stupor, with intervals of wakefulness and consciousness; but on the 3d the stupor became almost permanent. About seven o'clock of the evening of that day he awoke and, seeing me staying at his bedside, exclaimed, "Ah, Doctor, are you still there?" in a voice, however, that was husky and indistinct. He then asked, "Is it the Fourth?" to which I replied, "It will soon be." These were the last words I heard him utter.
Until towards the middle of the day—the 4th—he remained in the same state, or nearly so, wholly unconscious to everything that was passing around him. His circulation, however, was gradually becoming more languid; and for some time prior to dissolution the pulse at the wrist was imperceptible. About one o'clock he ceased to exist.[588]