After he had served his country twice as president, Jefferson retired to his home at Monticello and there spent his old age, still occupied with schemes for the public welfare. He believed in America for Americans. In a letter to President Monroe he said, “Our first and fundamental maxim should be never to entangle ourselves in the broils of Europe. Our second never to suffer Europe to intermeddle with Cis-Atlantic affairs.” He planned an educational system for Virginia which included a comprehensive free school system, and a university. He gave years of thought and study to planning the building, government, and course of study of this university. In 1818 the state legislature made a grant to establish the University of Virginia. Jefferson gave practically his whole life to the service of his country. He was in office thirty-nine years, and spent more than twenty years revising the Virginia Statutes and laboring to establish the University of Virginia. Thus, he said, his public services occupied over sixty years. During this time, his private affairs were neglected. From wealth in youth, he was reduced in old age to straitened circumstances. He sold his library, thirteen thousand volumes, to Congress for $23,950, about one-half of its auction value, and the money went to his creditors. In the summer of 1826 Jefferson was taken ill. At midnight July the third, he was heard to murmur, “This is the fourth of July.” About midday he died, fifty years after the Declaration of Independence was adopted. On the same day in Massachusetts was dying John Adams who had helped in the fight for the people’s rights. During his last hours, his thoughts turned to his great associate and he said, “Thomas Jefferson still lives.” On Jefferson’s tombstone were recorded as he had requested--not the offices he had held nor the honors he had received--but the three things by which he wished to be remembered,--that he wrote the Declaration of Independence, the Virginia Statute for religious liberty, and founded the University of Virginia. Alexander Hamilton The Founder of the Federalist Party