Monticello Secret Decoder Wheel

Monticello Secret Decoder WheelWhile serving as President George Washington's secretary of state (1790 1793), Thomas Jefferson devised an ingenious and secure method to encode and decode messages: the wheel cipher. During the American Revolution, Jefferson had relied primarily on messengers to hand carry sensitive letters, but codes became an essential part of his correspondence when he was America's minister to France (1784 1789) since European postmasters opened and read all

The rich border is in the rococo style fashionable in Thomas Jefferson's youth

anonymous writers

3¼"w x 3¼"h x 4¾"d

and then pull back on handles to move them through the soil

Winner of the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for historical biography

Annette Gordon-Reed is the Charles Warren Professor of American Legal History at Harvard Law School

how a trip to the great botanist John Bartram's garden helped the delegates of the Constitutional Congress break their deadlock

protecting natural fibers while adding a fresh

Particularly well suited as a cucumber trellis

and enslaved carpenter John Hemmings made examples at Monticello

The Declaration of Independence of the United States of America

Volume Nine of the project documenting Thomas Jefferson's last years presents 523 documents from 1 September 1815 to 30 April 1816