Thomas Jefferson was many things during his long and accomplished life: Founding Father, U.S. president, ambassador to France, architect, author, farmer, inventor, violinist and all-around renaissance man. Through it all, he was also something else: an incorrigible shopaholic, saddled with debt.
Jefferson inherited not one but two large estates, his father’s and his father-in-law’s, and earned a respectable income of his own from a variety of ventures. Even so, when he died at age 83 in 1826, he left behind debts in excess of $100,000—well over $1 million in today’s dollars, according to historian and biographer Jon Meacham.
Where did all the money go?
Pretty much everywhere. Jefferson amassed an unparalleled book collection and stocked his cellar with the choicest European wines. He poured a fortune into building and then remodeling his Virginia mansion, Monticello, a money pit if there ever was one. He entertained lavishly, even when uninvited strangers came to call, and was unfailingly generous to friends and relatives, taking on their debts in some instances, which only exacerbated his own.
At the same time, he adamantly opposed allowing the young United States to accumulate a national debt, putting him at odds with the country’s first Treasury secretary and his ideological foe, Alexander Hamilton, a man Jefferson “utterly loathed,” according to biographer Joseph Ellis. In fact, Ellis writes, Jefferson declared that eliminating the national debt was “the highest priority of his presidency.”
Ellis and other Jefferson scholars speculate that the crushing burdens of Jefferson’s own debts played a large part in his aversion to governmental debt—while having little effect on his personal spending. As Meacham writes, “Jefferson’s capacity to live with contradiction was nothing less than epic."
A Costly Inheritance
Thomas Jefferson was born into wealth in April 1743; both his parents descended from prosperous Virginia planters. As the eldest son of eight surviving children, Jefferson stood to collect the largest share of the family’s wealth.
When his father died in 1757, Jefferson inherited some 5,000 acres of land and more than 20 enslaved people. Because he was just 14 at the time, the property was held in trust for him until he turned 21. In the meantime, Jefferson attended college at William & Mary, studied law and began to show an interest in politics.
Among his inherited holdings was a small mountaintop where Jefferson envisioned building a mansion of his own design he called Monticello, for “little mountain.” Construction began in 1769, and Jefferson moved in the following year, even before its completion. He built and rebuilt it, working intermittently over 28 years, with costs varying each year depending on the ambition of his latest addition, the degree to which unpaid labor was used, whether materials were bartered and more. Between March 4, 1802 and March 4, 1803 alone, Jefferson tallied building costs (including workmen's salaries, building materials and other miscellaneous items) of $3587.92, more than $100,000 in today's dollars.
Monticello was also the name of his plantation, which grew wheat, tobacco and other crops. Even before the Revolution, that business began accruing debt to the Scottish firm that bought his tobacco. One way he worked to address his debt was to leverage the monetary value of the enslaved men and women he owned by using them as collateral to borrow money. “The Monticello we see today was built with a ‘slave-equity’ loan Jefferson obtained from a Dutch banking house,” says Henry Wiencek, author of Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves.
Expensive European Tastes
As Jefferson rose through a succession of increasingly important political and diplomatic offices—minister to France, secretary of state, vice president and ultimately president—he continued to dig himself deeper into debt. His interlude abroad had not only pulled his attention away from managing the plantation; it introduced him to the finer things in European life and apparently allowed plenty of free time for shopping.
Generally considered America’s first great wine connoisseur, Jefferson spent $7,500 (more than $200,000 today) on mostly French and Italian bottles in his first presidential term alone, including hundreds of bottles of Champagne, Lafite, Yquem and more. Marc Leepson, author of Saving Monticello, a history of the estate, discovered that Jefferson shipped 86 crates of his other French finds back to Monticello, including “furniture, silverware, glassware, china, wall paper, fabrics, books, portraits and other works of art.” As a gentleman of high stature and refined tastes, Jefferson gravitated to items by the most renowned artists and craftsmen.
More costly still, he’d become enamored of French architecture and decided to remodel Monticello accordingly. That project, begun in 1796, would double the mansion’s size as well as add its distinctive dome, reportedly the first in America. Monticello II, as it is often called, was finished in 1809—although Jefferson, being Jefferson, continued to tinker with it for the rest of his life.
Outside the mansion, he turned Monticello’s grounds into a curated decorative park and his fields into laboratories of sometimes pricey experimentation. His gardens alone were planted with more than 300 varieties of more than 90 different plants—including 15 kinds of peas. Many were exotic at the time, such as chickpeas and sea kale. He thought nothing of importing seeds and fruit trees from abroad, including olive trees from Italy and France and orange trees from Spain, the latter of which had to be moved inside during winter. His extensive, and failed, efforts to import and cultivate European wine grapes also proved costly.
Debt Deepened After the White House
Unfortunately, when his presidency also came to an end in 1809, Jefferson estimated that he was in even greater debt than before.
Like other presidents before him and many others after, Jefferson wasn’t entitled to a government pension. (That wouldn’t change until 1958, with the passage of the Former Presidents Act.) So, in retirement, Jefferson had to find other ways to support his family and repay his debts. “He hoped to pay his debts with his farming and business ventures,” Leepson told HISTORY.com in an interview. “Unfortunately, he wasn’t very good at either farming or business.”
Jefferson’s personal extravagance wasn’t entirely to blame for his situation. When his father-in-law, John Wayles, died in the early 1770s, the future president inherited not only 11,000 acres and 135 enslaved individuals, but a large chunk of Wayles’ debts, which he now needed to repay along with his own. And in 1818, he co-signed a $20,000 note for a friend who died two years later, leaving Jefferson saddled with more debt.
A Fire Sale and an Auction
While Jefferson might have been able to rationalize his debts earlier, as he approached the end of his life, he worried increasingly about how they would burden his heirs. In 1815, he sold the bulk of his precious library—more than 6,000 volumes—to the government for $23,950, using much of the proceeds to settle two key debts. The collection would help rebuild the Library of Congress, which had been torched by British troops in the War of 1812.
Soon after selling off his books, Jefferson, of course, began buying more. “I cannot live without books,” he explained in a letter to John Adams, his predecessor as president and an on-again, off-again friend.
In 1826, desperate to find a way to ease his heirs’ burden, Jefferson had a novel idea: a lottery in which Monticello would be first prize. The Virginia legislature, which had to approve the arrangement, at first balked, then relented. The plan was to sell about 11,480 tickets at $10 each, but the lottery ended up being postponed, and Jefferson died that July 4, before it could happen.
At the time of his death, Jefferson’s debts were calculated at $107,273.63, a substantial sum for the time. To help pay them off, Jefferson’s heirs put many of his household possessions, his livestock and some 130 enslaved persons up for auction in early 1827. As part of his will, he had previously freed five enslaved men, all members of the same family.
Disposing of Monticello proved more difficult, especially because it had fallen into disrepair. Initially, according to Leepson, the family hoped to get as much as $20,000 for it. But the house sat on the market until 1831, finally selling, along with 552 acres of land, for just $7,000 to James Turner Barclay, a local pharmacist.
Jefferson had named his eldest grandson, Thomas Jefferson Randolph, executor of his estate, leaving him the unenviable job of settling his debts. Randolph devoted his own life to the task, but when he died in his eighties, in 1875, it remained unfinished.
It was only with the settlement of Randolph’s own estate that the debts were completely erased. The year was 1878—more than half a century after Thomas Jefferson’s death.
