In his twilight years Jefferson was already taking on the luster of a national icon, which was polished off by his auspicious death (on July 4, 1896) and in the subsequent seventeen decades of his celebrity-now verging, thanks to virulent revisionists and television documentaries, on notoriety-has been inflated beyond recognition of the original person.For the historian Joseph J. After 1809, his longed-for retirement was compromised by a steady stream of guests and tourists who made of his estate at Monticello a virtual hotel, as well as by more than one thousand letters per year, most from strangers, which he insisted on answering personally. For a man who insisted that life on the public stage was not what he had in mind, Thomas Jefferson certainly spent a great deal of time in the spotlight-and not only during his active political career.
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