Thomas Jefferson was very near the end of his long life when he had a financial epiphany.

Facing debts that could ruin not only him, but his surviving daughter and a favorite grandson, the insomniac ex-president developed a late-night scheme to save family honor and his beloved hilltop home, Monticello.

		"TWILIGHT AT MONTICELLO: THE FINAL YEARS OF THOMAS JEFFERSON" By Alan Pell Crawford Random House ($27)

Like many Americans since, Jefferson planned to finance his retirement through a lottery. Unlike other Americans, Jefferson planned not to win one, but to start his own.

The Jefferson family would sponsor a drawing, with tickets selling for $1 each. The prize would be some marginal farmland. All that was needed, he told his grandson, Thomas Jefferson Randolph, was approval from the Virginia legislature.

How that plan -- and many others -- failed makes for interesting, if sobering, reading in Alan Pell Crawford's biography of Jefferson's last years.

Jefferson was 66 when he returned to Virginia after two successful terms as president. His triumphs had included the purchase of the Louisiana territory, a move that more than doubled the size of the nation. He was 83 when he died on July 4, 1826, 50 years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

While those 17 intervening years saw the birth of more grandchildren and great-grandchildren, they also brought illness, business failures, violent family feuds and the deaths of loved ones.

Jefferson achieved at least one other great victory in retirement. Helped by James Madison and James Monroe, he led efforts to create the University of Virginia. The new institution would have a neo-classical library, rather than a chapel, at the center of its campus.

He hoped it would serve as the South's intellectual counterweight to Harvard and Princeton, encouraging skeptical thinking about both religion and central government.

On balance, however, "Twilight" is a melancholy story.

Crawford describes how many of Jefferson's problems were self-created. Raised from birth to think of himself as gentry, he spared no expense to keep himself well housed, well fed and well read. Combine his enjoyment of luxury with an eagerness to borrow and an inability to match income with expenses, and the result was disaster.

His behavior was not unique. In 1776 Virginia was the most populous and wealthiest of the British colonies. When Jefferson died, Crawford writes, New York, Pennsylvania and Ohio had surpassed it.

Crawford describes how Jefferson, his friends and family members carried out a round-robin of co-signing each other's loans, even as Virginia's soil was exhausted and the value of their estates declined. The planters were able to carry on, in large part, because they relied on the labor of slaves and because slaves often served as the collateral for loans.

Personally opposed to slavery, Jefferson proposed several halfhearted efforts to end it. But even after his death, he and his heirs benefited from the peculiar institution, despite its heart-rending human cost.

In his will, Jefferson arranged to free a handful of his slaves; the remaining 130 were sold to satisfy debts.

One of the few given his freedom was Monticello's longtime blacksmith, Joe Fossett. Manumission for him was a mixed blessing. His wife and four children were sold to three different bidders.

"Whether the breakup of the Fossett family was typical is impossible to say," Crawford writes.