JEFFERSON, 3rd, 1801-09

The tall, auburn-haired, hazel-eyed, sharp-featured Thomas Jefferson spoke for the masses and despised what he called the Aristocracy of Wealth. He owned some two hundred slaves, a large plantation, and the grandest house in Virginia. He declared all men to be created equal. He made an exception for African slaves on the ground they weren't people. On a series of dramatic contradictions, a nation was conceived.

A gangling, freckled sloucher and lounger, he opened his doors at the White House to all without regard to social classification. He started the custom of a president shaking hands, rather than bowing to greet guests, and came and went like any other citizen.

He ate little animal meat. Vegetables were his principal diet.

Jefferson suffered from prolonged, incapacitating headaches. These correlated with stress or grief and were complicated by indecision and deeply buried rage. Horseback riding offered relief. In 1818, he had a severe attack of rheumatism. It was accompanied by life-threatening constipation. Jefferson developed boils on his buttocks. For several weeks he conducted his correspondence lying down. He did not ride a horse for several months.

Jefferson spent twenty-five years building his dream house, Monticello, where he brought his bride, the twenty-four-year-old Martha Wayles Skelton, in 1772. Ten years later, as she lay dying, he promised her that he would never remarry, and he never did.

Jefferson made a compilation of the Philosophy of Jesus known as the Jefferson Bible. He described it as "a paradigma of his doctrines, made by cutting the texts out of the book and arranging them on the pages of a blank book, in a certain order of time or subject."

His Garden Book records his love affair with perfection, failure, and renewal. In 1822, he could walk "only to reach my garden, and that with sensible fatigue." He wrote, "but though I am an old man, I am but a young gardener." Jefferson became comatose on July 2, 1826. On July 3, he awakened and asked: "Is it the fourth?" He died the next day in virtual poverty, and the house at Monticello, with all its furnishings, was sold to satisfy his creditors.

d. July 4, 1826 (Monticello near Charlottesville, Virginia), at 83, of old age.