Thomas Jefferson

President No. 3 (1801-1809)
Monticello
Not satisfied with taking another one-year break between visiting the presidents (see our timeframe between George Washington and John Adams), we headed out to Thomas Jefferson’s famed Monticello estate on a cold, cloudy, windy January day.

The three-hour drive to Charlottesville, Va., from the Washington, D.C., area was peaceful and scenic, since we chose to head down the bucolic Route 29 through the Shenandoah Valley instead of I-81 or I-64.

Travel note: There are several Wawa and Sheetz service stations on the road to Charlottesville. We particularly like the touch-screen ordering kiosks and the cleanliness of the stores. But our “quick” stops end up taking about 30 minutes as Cathy slowly peruses the aisles looking at all the food options. She has not taken a side on the Sheetz vs. Wawa debate – she likes both and stops at both.MonticelloThe visit to Monticello starts at the visitor’s center, where tourists can watch a short movie about Jefferson’s life. Then you hop on a shuttle for a 10-minute trip to the mansion, located at the highest point on the mountain overlooking Charlottesville.

We were met by a guide—without an overcoat in the biting cold—who pointed out the vastness of the land inherited by Jefferson in 1768. It extended almost as far as we could see.

Then he shepherded us out of the cold and into the house, pointing out that the single- pane class and the high ceilings would have made the house quite cold in Jefferson’s day. Almost every room has a fireplace, but the warmth would not have permeated very far.

Note: All the presidential residences we have visited so far have not allowed indoor photography. Thus, all of our photos are of the outside of the house or in the out buildings.
Jefferson rebuilt the home on several occasions, taking ideas from Roman architecture. His final version — the one standing today — has a domed roof and 13 skylights. Other features borrowed from houses he saw on his travels include alcoves for the beds and a dumbwaiter to quickly bring food from the outside, ground-level kitchen to the dining area.

The rooms at Monticello are quite small, particularly compared to those at Adams’ residence. As Adams’ house was expanded and modernized, the rooms became larger and larger, as Abigail filled them with all types of décor she saw on her European travels. Monticello comparatively is quite spare, and the rooms tiny.

Jefferson was a bibliophile and could read in seven languages: French, Italian, Spanish, Latin, Greek, Old English, and English. He had three immense libraries during his life. He lost the first library in a fire. He donated his second library of 6,500 books to the federal government to replenish the Library of Congress following the burning of Washington by the British in 1814. When he died, he had rebuilt his personal library to about 2,000 books. He was also a prodigious writer, having written 19,000 letters in his life – a rate of about five letters a week during adulthood.

Jefferson was deeply in debt at the end of his life — troubling because one of his written principles, on display at the gift shop, was “Never spend money before you have earned it.”

He had six children with his wife, Martha, although four of them died young. His daughter, Martha Jefferson Randolph, had 11 children who have produced about 2,100 descendents today — more than any other president. His wife, sadly, died from complications following the birth of their last child.

Our guide parted by thanking us for the opportunity to get out of the house and talk. He quipped, “I can’t talk at home because I’m married.”

The GroundsThe grounds are the home of Monticello’s inner workings. Underneath the house are the kitchen, stables, blacksmith shop, and other critical functions that kept Monticello humming. The ice house, also under the building, was particularly interesting. During the winter, workers filled the deep hole with lake ice and covered it with straw. When properly tended, the ice would last into the following fall.

On the cold walk back to the visitor’s center (we chose exercise instead of the much warmer shuttle bus), we stopped at the family cemetery. Many of the major figures from the time are buried there as well as those from more recent times. We learned from a shivering young guide that any member of the extended Jefferson family can be buried there. (Not sure about the Sally Hemings branch of the family tree.)

Jefferson designed his own gravesite and marker — an obelisk — for his tomb, as well as the wording that lists the accomplishments for which he wished to be remembered:
“Author of the Declaration of American Independence, of the Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom, and Father of the University of Virginia”. (Strangely, he never mentioned his presidency.)

Visitor’s CenterWe continued our way down the trail to the two-story visitor’s center museum. It was here that we learned that Jefferson was also an inventor, although our guide pointed out that he was not much of one; he redesigned a moldboard to improve the performance of plows.

One exhibit shows how Monticello was built. A 3-D visualization shows each stage of the creation including how Jefferson had the mansion mostly torn down and reconstructed following his return from France in 1789.

We were also impressed with a multi-screen exhibit (21 screens) called the Boisterous Sea of Liberty. However, as we sat in the warm, sunlit room, listening to the soft music, and watching the presentation, our eyes got heavy and we napped sitting up. OK, maybe that was the plan all along. Later Cathy asked if I knew there were people in the room with us. “Um, no.”

Note: We have found that we can’t get a complete picture of each president in a half day visit. Therefore, we are doing some post-visit research to get a fuller understanding. Some of that material is presented below.
Early Political LifeJefferson is, of course, known as the writer of the Declaration of Independence. He wrote the Declaration during the summer of 1776 when he was only 33 years old.

He later served as governor of Virginia from 1779–1781. During his governorship he was almost captured by the British and was forced to flee.

He was appointed Minister for France from 1785 to 1789 and was absent from the Constitutional Convention. Upon his return from France, Jefferson served in the Washington administration as Secretary of State. Following Washington’s retirement, he ran against John Adams in the election of 1796 but came in second in the voting. Under the Constitution at that time, the second-place finisher served as vice president, which he did under John Adams.

By this time, Jefferson had changed his political stance from a staunch Federalist (with a belief in a strong central government) to a Republican (with an emphasis on state autonomy). Because Adams remained a Federalist, their formerly close relationship soured. Jefferson was strongly opposed to Adams’ Alien and Sedition Act of 1800, which had the effect of squelching political dialog and which Jefferson had repealed during his presidency.

Jefferson’s PresidencyJefferson won a bitter battle with Adams for the 1800 presidential election. The legacy of that fight was the establishment of the two-party system that still exists today. Jefferson was reelected in 1804.

Perhaps Jefferson’s greatest presidential accomplishment was the purchase of a huge piece of land from cash-starved French in 1803 — the Louisiana Purchase. The territory extended from New Orleans all the way to the Canadian border, effectively doubling the size of the country for a mere $15 million. To learn more about this vast territory, he commissioned Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to explore the territory.

Post PresidencyJefferson and Adams reconciled in 1813 and redeveloped a strong relationship exclusively through letters. (One can argue that Jefferson and Adams were the first Facebook friends. Without physical or voice contact, their entire friendship was based on letters—dozens and dozens of letters.) As we noted during our John Adams write-up, their friendship lasted until their deaths on the same day – July 4, 1826, the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.

Jefferson and James Madison were also long-term friends. Madison’s home, Montpelier, was a day’s ride from Monticello, and he and Dolly Madison often visited. In fact, one of the rooms in Monticello is named the Madison Room because it was there that the Madisons stayed overnight. (We particularly liked the alcove bed in that room and were plotting how we could steal a nap in it.)

Thomas Jefferson and SlaveryJefferson inherited slaves with his large plantation. Apparently, the question of slavery troubled him. He believed it was a moral evil but that future generations would have to deal with this “deplorable entanglement.”

However, it didn’t trouble him enough to end his own practice of it. He owned between 150 and 200 slaves. He reportedly hired overseers who were known for their cruelty including the whipping of slaves. (On the positive side, if there can be one, he also gave incentives to some slaves and promoted them for hard work. For example, he gave one slave a barrel for every 30 barrels he made, which he could then sell and make money when not working.)

Even the house slaves worked hard. They were responsible for the weekly washing of clothes, linens and other laundry. This involved soaking, soaping, rubbing, washing, boiling, draining, rinsing, bluing, rerinsing, starching, wringing, drying, and ironing. Since there was no running water, all water needed to be brought up and heated in tubs.

During his life it was rumored that Jefferson had fathered children with Sally Hemings, one of his young, light skinned slaves. Recent DNA evidence shows a high likelihood that he fathered at least one and possibly all six of Hemings’ children. When I asked a docent about how often the sex was consensual, she offered that “slaves were considered property.” In the present day that would be considered rape, but it obviously it wasn’t seen that way by Jefferson (I hope). Heming’s was actually related to Jefferson’s deceased wife, Martha, through her father. (Don't ask.)  Jefferson scholar Paul Finkelman of the Albany Law School calls Thomas Jefferson “one of the most deeply creepy people in American history.” 

Jefferson was deeply in debt in his later years and was unable to provide for the freedom of his slaves upon his death (as Martha Washington had done). His grandson ended up selling the 130 slaves.

Jefferson’s ownership of slaves erodes his credibility — how could he write the famous, inspiring phrase “all men are created equal” and yet own other men and women? The same applied to Washington, Madison and James Monroe, the other plantation-owning Founding Fathers.

Cathy suggested that he and the other slave-holding Founding Fathers rationalized their behavior. Perhaps they thought (correctly) that the institution was not of their making and that this infrastructure was already in place. Perhaps they thought that the agrarian South couldn’t economically sustain itself without slavery. Perhaps they thought that slaves were somehow not human. Joseph Ellis, Pulitzer Prize-winning author, postulates that that the Founding Fathers needed to be practical and that there was zero chance of reaching a consensus on the Constitution if the issue of slavery was included. It was insoluble at that time.

All these reasons make sense. But, if anyone were to understand the implications of withholding freedom from a group of people, it was the Founding Fathers. They of all people should have known better. Many of them were not just tolerating slavery, they were practicing it. I can’t think of a historical parallel of such demonstrable hypocrisy.

As a final note, Halliday (2001) points out that at least some of the inscriptions on the Jefferson Memorial are truncated. One, for example, reads, "Nothing in more certainly written in the book of fate, than that these people are to be free." But the same sentence as written in Jefferson's autobiography concludes with, "...nor is it less certain that the two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government."

References
Ellis, J. 2000. Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation. Alfred A. Knopf. New York, New York.

Ellis, J. 2007. American Creation: Triumphs and Tragedies at the Founding of the Republic. Alfred A. Knopf. New York, New York.

Halliday, E.M. 2001. Understanding Thomas Jefferson. Harper Collins Publishers. New York, New York.

Schuessler, J.  2012.  Jefferson:  Slaveholder Vs. Patriot.  New York Times.  November 27, 2012.