The president had taken his afternoon ride around Washington on his favorite horse, Eagle, and still wore his riding clothes: a comfortable, worn brown jacket, red waistcoat, corduroy pants, and woolen socks. He had exchanged his riding boots for the slippers without heels that had shocked foreign envoys who’d expected more-regal footwear gracing the presidential feet.
The president’s long arm reached out to a cabinet. The doors flew open at the touch of his finger, a feature that appealed to Jefferson’s love of gadgetry. Stacked neatly inside the cabinet were a cut-glass goblet, a decanter filled with French red wine, a plate of cakes, and a night candle used to navigate the corridors back to his bedroom. He poured half a glass of wine, held it dreamily to the light, and took a sip that brought back fond memories of Paris.
Tomorrow could not come too soon. Within hours, the onerous burden of office would be shifted to the narrow but capable shoulders of his friend James Madison.
He savored another sip and returned to the papers spread out on his desk. Written in the same flowing hand that had penned the Declaration of Independence were specimens, arranged in columns, of more than fifty Indian vocabularies collected over a thirty-year period.
Jefferson had long been obsessed with the question of how the Indians came to North America and had spent years compiling lists of words commonly used in Indian languages and dialects. His theory was that similarities between words from the Old and New World might offer a clue to the Indians’ origin.
Jefferson had shamelessly exercised his presidential power in pursuit of his obsession. He had once invited five Cherokee chiefs to a White House reception and quizzed them about their language. He had instructed Meriwether Lewis to collect vocabularies from the Indians the explorer encountered on his historic journey to the Pacific Ocean.
The book Jefferson planned to write on the origins of the Indian would be the culmination of his intellectual career. The tumultuous events of his second term had temporarily stalled the project, and he had put off sending the lists to the printer until he could write digests of the reams of new material Lewis and Clark had brought back from their trek.
Vowing to tend to the task as soon as he was back at Monticello, he stacked the papers into a neat pile, tied it with string, and placed it with the other vocabularies and stationery in a sturdy trunk. It would be transported with his belongings to the James River and loaded onto a boat that would take his baggage to Monticello. He placed the last packet of documents in the trunk and snapped the cover shut.
His desk was clear now except for a pewter box that had his name embossed on the lid. The president opened the box and removed a rectangular piece of vellum about ten by twelve inches in size. He held the soft animal hide close to an oil lamp. The pebbled surface was covered with strange writing, wavy lines, and Xs. One edge was ragged.
He had acquired the vellum in 1791. He and his Virginia neighbor “Jemmy” Madison had ridden on horseback to Long Island, New York, to meet some impoverished remnants of the Unkechaug tribe. Jefferson had hoped to find someone who knew the ancient languages of the Algonquin tribe, and, in fact, three elderly women could still speak the old language. Jefferson had compiled a glossary from them that he hoped would help prove his thesis about the European origin of the Indians.
The chief of the tribe had presented Jefferson with the vellum, saying it had been passed down from generation to generation. Touched by the gesture, Jefferson had asked a rich landowner and fellow signer of the Declaration to provide for the Indians.
Looking at the vellum now, an idea occurred to him. He took it over to a table, where a horizontal wooden easel had two pens suspended from a framework that allowed them to move simultaneously. Jefferson regularly used this copying machine, known as a polygraph, for his voluminous correspondence.
He copied the vellum markings and added notes asking the recipient to identify the language in which the words were written. Then he addressed and sealed the envelopes and placed them in a basket for outgoing mail.
The Unkechaug word lists were packed with the other papers in the trunk. Jefferson wanted to keep the vellum close, and he placed it back in the box. He would carry the box in his saddlebags on the ride to Monticello. He glanced at the wall clock again, drained his wineglass, and rose from his chair.
At the age of sixty-five, Jefferson hadn’t an ounce of surplus flesh on his farmer’s body. His thick hair was going from reddish blond to sandy gray as he aged. With his square-shouldered, musket-barrel posture and six-foot-two-inch height, he would always be an imposing figure. Inflammatory arthritis was making inroads, but, after he worked the stiffness out of his limbs, his movements were flexible and easy, and he moved with the grace of a younger man.
He lit his night candle and made his way along the silent White House corridors to his bedroom.
Up at dawn, he rode to the new president’s inauguration with his usual lack of pomp and ceremony. With a touch of his hat, he simply galloped past the waiting cavalry escort, dismounted near the Capitol, and hitched his horse to a picket fence. He sat with the public during the inauguration. Later, he paid a farewell visit at the White House. At the inaugural ball he danced with Dolley Madison.
The next day he finished packing, making certain in particular that the trunk with his Indian material was on the wagon that would take it to the James River. Setting off on horseback for Monticello, he rode eight hours through a driving snowstorm in his eagerness to resume life as a country gentleman.
SOON AFTER, Jefferson was returning to Monticello with friends and saw his house slaves unloading boxes from a wagon drawn close to the mansion’s columned entrance. As he rode closer, he recognized a stocky, bearded figure as the captain of the James River boat carrying his baggage from Washington.
He dismounted and strode to the wagon, but, in his excitement at seeing his baggage arrive, he didn’t notice the boatman’s stricken expression. He rapped his knuckles on the side of the wagon. “Good work, Captain. All arrived safe and sound, I see.”
The captain’s round face crumpled like an overripe pumpkin. “Not all, I’m sorry to say, sir,” he mumbled.
“What do you mean?”
The captain seemed to shrink into himself. Jefferson towered over the riverman by several inches and would have been a formidable figure even if he hadn’t been the former president of the United States. He seemed to bore holes right through the hapless captain with eyes almost luminous in their intensity.
As the riverman told his story, he wrung his hat so tight it was a wonder that he didn’t tear it into pieces.
Jefferson’s trunk had been vandalized on the last leg of the boat’s journey while ascending the river above Richmond. The thief had boarded the boat while it was tied up and the crew was sleeping on shore, the captain said. A trunk had been emptied. The captain handed Jefferson some mud-smeared papers, explaining that they had been found on the riverbank.
Jefferson stared at the wet wad in his hand.
Barely able to get the words out, he said, “Nothing else stolen?”
“No, sir.” The captain brightened at the opportunity to point out the silver lining. “Only the one trunk.”
“Tell me where you found this,” he demanded.
Moments later, Jefferson and his friends galloped off, and rode until they came to the river, then fanned out along both sides. After an intensive search, they fished out some papers that had floated ashore. Except for a few sheets, the mud-caked specimens of Indian vocabularies were water-damaged beyond use.
Later that summer, a petty thief and drunk was arrested and charged with the crime. The man claimed he had been hired by a stranger to steal the papers and pretend they were destroyed.
Jefferson was glad the culprit had been caught and might be hanged. He took no interest in the man’s fate. The scoundrel had caused him an irreparable loss. Jefferson had more pressing problems, such as tending his long-neglected fields and trying to figure out how to pay his mounting debts.
That was all changed months later when a letter arrived in the mail.
Jefferson had received several replies from the notes he had mailed from the White House to members of the Philosophical Society. All expressed their puzzlement at the word lists Jefferson had transcribed from the vellum. Except for one.
Professor Holmberg was a linguist at OxfordUniversity. He apologized for not answering Jefferson sooner but he had been traveling in North Africa. He knew exactly what language the words were written in and enclosed translations.
Jefferson’s eyes widened as he read Holmberg’s findings. With the letter in hand, he roamed his library and plucked volume after volume from his bookshelves. History. Language. Religion.
He spent the next several hours reading and making notes. When he had pushed away the last book, he sat back in his chair, tented his fingers, and stared into space. After a moment lost in thought, Jefferson silently mouthed a familar name.
Lewis was a man of extraordinary talents. Jefferson had been aware of his fellow Virginian’s qualities when he’d asked Lewis to lead the exploratory expedition to the PacificCoast in 1803.
Educated, intrepid, versed in the sciences, tough physically, Lewis was an outdoorsman familiar with Indian customs, and possessed of a sterling character. He’d been a well-respected army captain before he had come to work for Jefferson in the White House, where he added diplomacy, statesmanship, and politics to his quiver of talents.
The expedition had been successful beyond belief. After Lewis returned to Washington in 1806 with William Clark, the expedition’s coleader, Jefferson appointed him as governor of the LouisianaTerritory.
Lewis had reason to wonder, however, whether the appointment was a reward or a punishment. Even with all his talents and energy, Lewis had a hard time trying to tame the wild frontier. The explorer’s political enemies were relentless.
One night, after Lewis had spent another wearying day dealing with charges that he’d spent government money on a fur company in which he had an interest, he saw a sealed packet on his desk and immediately recognized Jefferson’s handwriting. Lewis had a smile on his hawk-nosed face as he slid a knife blade under the seal and carefully unwrapped the stiff paper that enclosed a stack of documents. The note inside said:
My Dear Mr. Lewis. Your gardens might benefit from the information contained within. TJ
The next page was entitled “The Cultivation of Artichokes.” The pages contained a detailed treatise, complete with planting tables and a garden diagram.
He spread the contents of the packet on his desktop, his brow wrinkled in puzzlement. Lewis knew of Jefferson’s interest in gardening, but it seemed strange that he would take the trouble to send information on artichoke cultivation halfway across the continent. He must have known that Lewis’s crushing responsibilities left no time for gardening.
Then the light of comprehension dawned on Lewis’s long face and his pulse quickened. He pawed through the shelves of a cabinet where he had stored the reports from the Lewis and Clark expedition and found what he was looking for within minutes.
Sandwiched between two bundles of documents was a sheet of heavy paper, which he extracted and held up to the light. The sheet was perforated with dozens of small rectangular holes, and, with trembling fingers, he placed the matrix over the first written page in the artichoke file and copied the letters that showed through the holes onto a separate sheet of paper.
When Jefferson had conceived the idea for the Pacific expedition, he knew that Lewis would be in a diplomatically sensitive position exploring territory held by France and Spain. Behind Jefferson’s sphinxlike imperturbability was a mind as devious as any to be found in the courts and palaces of Europe. In corresponding with his minister to France, he had often used a cipher, which he described as “a mask when we need it.”
While Lewis was in Philadelphia preparing for his journey with leading scientists from the Philosophical Society, Jefferson sent him a cipher he had worked up for the expedition. He based the encryption method on the Vigenere cipher widely used in Europe. The system involved an alphanumeric table and was unlocked with a key word.
Dear Mr. Lewis: I hope this missive finds you well. I have taken the liberty of submitting this report to you in the enciphered form upon which we had agreed, with the goal that it should be for your eyes only, and for your sole disposition. I fear that the information enclosed, whether true or not, would excite certain passions, cause men to go into territory where they were ill-prepared to survive, and create problems with the Indians. I understood that you are fully engaged in the formidable task of placing a harness on the Louisiana stallion, but plead your assistance in resolving this matter.