BRACK: Going down a rabbit hole of Thomas Jefferson’s past

Commentary   |  The title of the page on the Library of Congress website got my attention:  “Thomas Jefferson to Brack, March 2, 1788, in French.”

For some reason – who knows why? – when tooling around on the library’s website in the spring, I entered my last name into the search engine and got that unexpected result. 

The one-page letter is splotchy, obviously written in ink, perhaps with a quill since fountain pens didn’t become popular until the 1800s.  It’s hard to read and in French, not my best language.  But I could tell it was written in Paris, that Jefferson was thankful about something and that it was addressed to a Monsieur Brack.  And Jefferson’s signature – affixed just a few years earlier to the Declaration of Independence – was recognizable and clear as a bell.

So I thought the letter might be an interesting translation project for French students at my daughter’s school.  I contacted Steven Tucker, the teacher at James Island Charter High School, and suggested students might have fun taking a crack at it, noting “it might be something more familiar to people who are reading French.”

Tucker was all-in, taking it on as a mini-project for his students and himself.  A handful of students saw the letter as a puzzle “but with the level of the language and blurriness, it was difficult to complete.”  So Tucker shared the letter with some friends – here and when he was in France over the summer. They were able to figure out most of the letter, making educated guesses where it was the most blurry.  It certainly caused some interesting conversations (we hope over a good bottle of wine.)

Apparently, the subject of the letter was some lost mail – yes, there were problems with that at the founding of the country, too.  Jefferson wrote that he sent a servant from Paris to Calais to collect some “gazettes,” which could have been bound newspapers or official government documents.  But somehow, the package “was seized from an address of his that you are looking for. He told you of the horror and the anguish that this fact took on him during a month.”  Anyway, the letter thanked this Monsieur Brack for his help in trying to find the documents.

For some reason, the translators thought the blurred letter was written in 1808. But that was confusing because the Library of Congress file read 1788, and Jefferson was in the last year of his presidency in 1808.  So what would he be doing in Paris?  After going down several rabbit holes in hopes of clearing up the discrepancy, it was clear Jefferson wasn’t in Paris in 1808.  He was in Washington leading a new country.  

One clue in the letter was of a man named Petit or Pitet, which Tucker said was hard to read.  According to the letter, Petit apparently was the servant  (“mon domestique”) who was trying to figure out what happened to the gazettes.

So we headed over to the trusty internet again, surprised to learn that Jefferson employed a butler who ran his household named Adrien Petit, according to the Monticello website.  Petit was a native of Champagne who entered Jefferson’s service in 1785 when serving as minister to France.  Interestingly, Jefferson so valued Petit that he persuaded him to leave France and join him in America in 1791.  Three years later he retired and returned to France.

That made me look again at the letter and realize that it was dated 1788, not 1808, as the translators assumed (yes, it’s very blotchy).  And then everything fell into place – Jefferson was serving as a diplomat in Paris, wanted some information and sent Petit to get it, but it got lost.  He wrote this Brack from Paris trying to figure out what happened.  It’s not clear where Brack was – all of our family appears to come from the United Kingdom – but because the letter was in French, Monsieur Brack must have been somewhere in France.

Mystery solved! (Even though the gazettes are still missing).  Many thanks to Tucker, his students and his colleagues for assisting on the quest.

• Read the letter in French at: https://www.loc.gov/resource/mtj1.009_0067_0067/

Andy Brack is editor and publisher of Statehouse Report and the Charleston City Paper.  Have a comment? Send to: feedback@charlestoncitypaper.com.