Edmunds County Tribune -

From the Ipswich Tribune

April 5, 1928 edition

JEFFERSON FOUND HIS LETTER WRITING A BURDEN

Thomas Jefferson liked to write letters and to receive them, but the burden became almost unendurable. He wrote John Adams in 1817 that from dinner to dark he was “drudging at the writing table.”

“All this,” he continued “to answer letters into which neither interest nor inclination on my part enters; and often from persons whose names I have never before heard. Yet, writing civilly, it is hard to refuse them civil answers. This is the burden of my life, a very grievous one indeed and one which I must get rid of.”

He consented to write a few lines of introduction to one of Delaplaine’s books that he might make there a public appeal for relief from this burden, but it does not appear to have been successful, for he wrote Adams in 1822 that he had received 1,267 letters the previous year and had answered all, though many of them had required long replies and some extensive investigation.

“Is this life?” he asked. “At best it is but the life of a mill horse that sees no end to his circle but in death. To such a life that of a cabbage is paradise.” Since he had earlier described the life of a cabbage as “surely not worth a wish.” He had evidently come close to the irreducible minimum in enjoyment of existence. At the time of his death, he had 26,000 letters filed and had copies of 16,000 replies.

- J. G. de Roulbae Hamilton, in Century Magazine