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In 1757, Virginia plantation owner Peter Jefferson died. His fourteen-year-old son Thomas inherited all of his father’s Ablemarle County, Virginia property, including Thomas’s birthplace in what is now Shadwell and five acres on a mountaintop two miles away. Over the course of his life, Thomas Jefferson made that mountaintop his home, starting a construction project that lasted decades, from around 1769 to 1809. Many sources agree that it was finally completed in 1823; others state it was never really completed.
Jefferson named his home Monticello, which means “little mountain” in old Italian. On the mountaintop, he constructed his house as well as Mulberry Row, the complex of many outbuildings where employees and slaves he inherited from his father and father-in-law resided. Jefferson, a self-taught architect, was the sole architect of his famous house. Inspired by architectural styles from ancient Greece, France, and Italy, Jefferson designed what he considered an “essay in architecture”. In an introduction to Monticello: The Official Guide to Thomas Jefferson’s World by Charley Miller and Peter Miller, Leslie Greene Bowman, president of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, writes: “Monticello was the center of Jefferson’s world; to understand him, you must experience Monticello, his autobiographical statement.” That autobiographical statement, a masterpiece of form following function with original, unorthodox architectural ideas, was informed by Jefferson’s beloved Age of Enlightenment from its aesthetic and practical integration to its decor.
After Jefferson’s death on July 4, 1826, the entire property (including slaves) was auctioned off due to the enormous debt Jefferson had accumulated throughout his life. In 1831, James Barclay purchased Monticello. Three years later, Naval Commodore Uriah Phillips Levy purchased it, resolving to preserve the house and grounds as best he could out of gratitude for Jefferson’s Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom. Levy was Jewish, and Jews were persecuted in Virginia prior to Jefferson’s document. (During his naval tenure, Levy fought religious persecution and flogging.) The property remained in the possession of Levy’s family for over ninety years. In 1923, the newly formed Thomas Jefferson Foundation, celebrating its centennial this year, purchased Monticello and has restored it over the intervening decades. It continues to own and preserve Monticello, offering daily tours and maintaining exhibits and museums.
On Tuesday, November 14, I visited Monticello and took their Behind the Scenes and Slavery in Monticello Tours. The Foundation has reconstructed Monticello to resemble what it looked like during Jefferson’s years after retiring from the presidency in 1809, after which he never left Virginia. Other than the window glass, most of the house is original, according to the tour guides, including around seventy percent of the artifacts.
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The tour continued along the southeast end of the house into the Family Sitting Room.
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Past the Family Sitting Room is Jefferson’s Library.
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Next to the Library is the Cabinet (or office).
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Many evenings were spent in the Parlor, and many were musical.
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The tour of the first floor concluded with the dining room.
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The tour continued to part of the second floor.
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The Behind the Scenes tour continued to the third floor, including the Dome Room.
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The tour continued to the north end of the second floor and stopped in Jefferson’s granddaughters’ bedroom.
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The north end of the second floor also contains a nursery.
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Next to the nursery is Martha Jefferson Randolph’s bedroom.
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The Behind the Scenes Tour wound down in the cellar.
The tour concluded upstairs and outdoors at the South Wing. I found the tour guide, Cassie, to be knowledgable and informative.
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After the tour, self-guided tours include the South Pavilion.
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Downhill from the main house and plantation, a visitor can see the Jefferson family burial ground, including Jefferson’s grave.
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Another guide, named Tom, led that afternoon’s brief Slavery at Monticello Tour, which took place along Mulberry Row, the section of the property to the south of the house that included many outbuildings where slaves, lived and worked, almost none of which survive. Tom prefaced his remarks by saying there was no easy way to discuss the physical, psychological, and social subjugation of human beings. He stressed Jefferson’s inconsistencies while downplaying some of the complicated context of his ownership of slaves, including the fact that he inherited them and tried repeatedly to end slavery in Virginia as a young man. He shared many details of the lives of slaves at Monticello. They labored from sunrise to sunset Monday through Saturday, and many of them slept on dirt floors. Jobs cooking, sewing, building, etc. were preferred to those in the fields, but it was all demanding, strenuous work. The more industrious in the fields were “promoted” to better jobs, and if they did not meet quotas they were “sent to ground” (back to the fields), which was always a one-way journey. He also discussed the different ways slaves could be freed (while downplaying the difficulties—often impossibilities—in doing so). They included “passing”, an informal, de facto freedom in which those who looked white could surreptitiously slip into white society. Two of Sally Hemings’s and Thomas Jefferson’s children, Eston and Madison, were freed this way. Manumission was more formal and included papers to show one’s status as a free individual. Beverley and Harriet Hemings were formally freed. Sally Hemings was “given her time” and sent to live with her sons in Charlottesville, though she technically died a slave. Upon her death, Eston and Madison moved to Ohio and “passed”, living as “whites” among white society. Eston became known as a musician, and both men’s sons fought as “whites” in the segregated Union army in the Civil War. Beverley and Harriet moved to Washington after being freed. Tom stressed that mothers both celebrated and mourned upon learning their children were freed—they never saw their children again.
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Every admirer of Thomas Jefferson must seriously consider his decisions and behavior, as well as the intractable, complicated context of his slaveownership. While I have disagreements with some of the comments of the tour guides and think they downplay those complications, the Thomas Jefferson Foundation deserves credit for confronting this legacy and openly discussing it, criticizing Jefferson where appropriate. Jefferson inherited the institution of slavery as well as his slaves, and it was inculcated in him since birth that it was a necessary and honorific institution. He obviously disagreed and tried to end slavery, becoming what many have described as the lone dissenter on slavery in the Virginia government. He introduced a dozen pieces of legislation that would have curtailed or ended slavery in Virginia, and they were all soundly defeated. That was a towering, heroic feat of intellectual and political independence. While it was impossible for him to free all (or most) of his slaves, his behavior was not consistent, and some of it was bad. He allowed whipping (but only in “extreme” circumstances). He advertised for the return of runaways. He gave away slaves as wedding gifts, which tore families apart. All of this is unfortunate and deserving of harsh criticism. In the earlier tour, Cassie stated that his relationship with Sally Hemings could not have been consensual while stressing her “agency” and her decision to forego emancipation in Paris (where she was recognized as free) and return to Virginia with Jefferson. Elsewhere, I have written my views on what I regard as a complicated but consensual relationship (which some have speculated was originally her idea). Obviously, we will never know many of the details of this relationship. We do know that Jefferson’s legacy eventually led to the abolition of that abomination and blot on humanity’s history which was far worse than today’s abominations. Both Cassie and Tom stressed that fact about Jefferson’s legacy, pointing out that his words and actions led to future activism by Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Susan B. Anthony. Tom used the metaphor of Jefferson constructing the first step of a ladder and connected it to other ideas of his, pointing out that his statute of religious freedom was an unprecedented document with no counterpart in the world at that time. Jefferson’s worst behavior is distressing, but his actions were better than those of most in similar circumstances. Contrary to the vicious, out of context attacks on him by many of today’s pundits, he did far more to benefit the cause of liberty than otherwise, and his words and actions were part of the chain reaction that culminated in 1865.
Tom ended his tour with a paraphrase of a “great quote” from “a guy named H.L. Mencken” stressing that ending slavery would never have been simple or easy. In “The Divine Afflatus”, published in the New York Evening Mail on November 16, 1917, Mencken wrote, “Explanations exist; they have existed for all time; there is always an easy solution to every human problem—neat, plausible, and wrong.” To refer to chattel slavery (chattel means property) as a problem is an understatement, and Mencken’s quote is also an understatement in the context of slavery.
Monticello is open daily, year-round. I encourage everyone to visit and confront Jefferson’s legacy and autobiographical statement themselves, coming to their own conclusions. Monticello includes a visitor center with museums. Had I known how much there is to see, I would have purchased tickets to tours earlier in the day; at least one full day is required to see everything on the little mountain. Thanks to Cassie, Tom, and the Thomas Jefferson Foundation for a memorable, enlightening day. The Foundation is private. According to the official guidebook, it receives no significant government funding, which is consistent with Jefferson’s philosophy of limited government.