A Visit to Jefferson’s Monticello as the Declaration of Independence Turns 250

It’s a vibrant house museum, a scholarly center, and as close to Jefferson’s clone as we’ll get.

A fter writing more than a dozen stories on America’s 250th, and with July Fourth nearly here, where else would I go but Monticello? Through an extraordinary life — master of a plantation, chief author of the Declaration of Independence, diplomat, Washington’s secretary of state, Adams’s unhappy VP, a massively pivotal president, and university founder — Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) worked on Monticello for 50 years and with such passion that in the house he forged the best version of himself. Toward the end he was unfathomably in debt. Still, in 1822 he hired stonecutters to make the house’s portico bases, columns, and steps. In 1825, he ordered marble mantles for his fireplaces — from Italy — and in luxury marble, too. The house was already inching toward dilapidation

My view of Monticello isn’t elegiac, and I’ll save slavery for the end. I look at this remarkable house mostly as a buzzing history museum and curatorial enterprise. It’s anything but static. I’d been there once before, a couple of days after July 4, 1976. Queen Elizabeth had just visited the day before with President Ford. I thought it was a grand house, though it seems smaller now, and I’m more conscious of how horizontal it is. America had lots of land so, to Jefferson, living horizontally was the American thing to do.

Monticello echoes ancient Rome and is basically Palladian, but it’s made of brick from Jefferson’s Virginia mud. How could there not be French touches? Jefferson spent years in France as our envoy and is thought to have been moved by the wooden dome at the Halle aux Blés, the Paris grain market, and, for his projecting parlor, the Hôtel de Salm, which was then a fashionable Parisian home and still new when Jefferson was there — it was the building that led him to tell friends he’d fallen in love with Paris. French furniture, fabric, food — famously half-Virginian, half-French — and highbrow French wine figured at Monticello as well.

The dome and classical porticos on the east and west sides of Monticello’s central wing made it unique among Southern houses. His multiple octagonal spaces are also unique — he found them cozy and thought they expressed his sense of self as a complicated man. Likely the most radical move is that the house is on a high hill. Yes, it makes for a splendid view but at the cost of ease of access for his family and guests and for supplies, but he owned the hill. Monticello is its crown.

When I write about a place, I want to have the same experience everyone else has, so I took a public tour. The Entrance Hall is the first stop, as it was for visitors in Jefferson’s day, and it gives a peek — by his design — into his mind and his vision of America. It’s his miniature museum, 28 by 24 feet, and a gallery, with big wall-mounted maps of the United States from 1802 — he used a copy in planning Lewis and Clark’s expedition — and of Europe, Asia, and Africa from about the same time. He’s worldly and curious. There are antlers of large critters, the upper jawbone of a mastodon excavated from the early Big Bone Lick site in Kentucky, and fossils. Jefferson thought our fossilized creatures were bigger and better than Europe’s and our dash of antiquity. There are decorated Indian hides, bows and arrows, and, opposite each other, busts of Hamilton, whom he hated, and Jefferson in Roman costume. “Opposed in death as in life,” he said. There are pertinent religious pictures, including a Saint Jerome in Meditation. There’s an engraving of Trumbull’s Signing of the Declaration of Independence, from 1832, too. The 18-foot-tall ceiling is decorated with plaster eagles and stars.

Jefferson’s great clock is the flashiest thing in the Hall. It’s from around 1792, double-faced, with iron weights that look like cannonballs, an expression of Jefferson’s hope that domestic peace, plenty, and regularity would one day replace war. Its gong is deep and bold — the gong-heard-round-the-world kind of thing.

There’s Houdon’s sculpture of Turgot, too. He was an economic adviser to Louis XVI, a fiscal hawk, a proponent of voting rights only for men who owned land and was considered the first scholar to understand the law of diminishing returns. The room is whitewashed and has an amber dado — the section of the wall below the chair rail — and a floor cloth that’s grass-green, a color suggested to Jefferson by Gilbert Stuart. It suggests optimism and renewal and connects us to nature. Lewis and Clark gave Jefferson some of the Native things in his Hall. He saw American Indians as the Romantics did: noble savages, stoic and courageous.

The Cabinet, or study, is where Jefferson read, which he did and a lot, and wrote — his correspondence is epic. It’s commodious enough — about 200 square feet — but un-kingly and nicely cluttered. Things swivel, starting with his armchair, made around 1790, with a tall, curved barrel back to accommodate the 6’2” Jefferson. It was something he could age into. And he could prop his legs on an upholstered bench. He wrote letters on the mahogany table, on casters, and there sits his polygraph, or copying machine. It’s basically a second pen programmed to duplicate his handwriting as he wrote.

We see his telescope there, as well as his theodolite, a gadget measuring horizontal and vertical angles. He loved gadgets. Globes and a bust of his frenemy John Adams, a gift in 1825, are among his other treasures. The wallpaper is pea green, chosen from color samples ticked in an old book on grammar owned by Jefferson’s daughter Martha in the early 1800s. Jefferson loved peas but, beside that point, it’s a green that soothes. The room is all about thinking, moving, writing, and, yes, napping.

Man does not live by swiveling, thinking, and writing alone. The Dining Room is chrome yellow, warm and bold, one of Van Gogh’s favorite colors and a hot, new color in 1800. It stimulates the appetite and looks good in daylight and by candlelight. The ceiling’s nearly 18 feet and decorated with Doric-style plaster. Jefferson discovered dumbwaiters in Paris and liked their contribution to timely course changes and to confidentiality. Fewer nosy staff came and went.

In his Tea Room are his busts of heroes — Franklin, Lafayette, Washington, and John Paul Jones — and a space for dinner party overflow and for tête-à-têtes. I like seeing the china and silver of the rich and famous, and Jefferson’s doesn’t disappoint, with French silver making food, coffee, and tea taste better. The Parlor, like most of the rooms at Monticello, set before us Jefferson’s civic philosophy as well as his very good taste. Cherry and beech parquet floors designed by Jefferson — unpainted — are gorgeous, as are the crimson damask chairs.

As with the Entrance Hall, the Dining Room, and the Tea Room, furniture is easily moved to open the space, whether for a big reception, dancing, or a wedding. Parlor portraits of Locke, Newton, and Francis Bacon — to Jefferson the greatest men who ever lived, a tall order — are together over a mirror. Portraits of laughing and weeping philosophers were once over the fireplace, “dividing the world between them,” as a visitor wrote, and around the room are depictions of Vespucci, Columbus, Walter Raleigh, the Russian tsar Alexander I, and Napoleon, all, like Jefferson, men of great consequence. From the despot Napoleon Jefferson got that good real estate deal called the Louisiana Purchase.

Today, Monticello is a massive operation. The superb research library focuses on Jefferson and his era. There’s a historic garden, an archeological site, a slew of outbuildings, a cemetery, of course, mostly for Jefferson and his family, and amenities for Monticello’s 300,000 or so annual visitors. Its budget last year was about $41 million. Its endowment is more than $400 million, so it’s definitely no longer in unfathomable debt. It’s well run, serious, and a university for all things Jefferson and welcoming. Everything’s done at a very high level of quality.

Jane Kamensky is the president of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation. She came from a Harvard professorship and wrote a wonderful book on John Singleton Copley, A Revolution in Color, and another called Governing the Tongue: The Politics of Speech in Early New England that’s about Puritan efforts to control public speech. From what I hear, she’s very supportive of the curators — Diane Ehrenpreis, Emilie Johnson, and Susan Stein — who have been there for a long time and know the place nearly as well if not better than Jefferson did, as does the preservation expert Gardiner Hallock. The only peer house for history, objects, and complexity of site is Mount Vernon.

As a designer, Jefferson sometimes failed. Staircases are like narrow, steep, spiral ladders. Climb at your peril. That’s Jefferson’s nod to egalitarianism. There’s no grand staircase used for ritual enforcing of rank. Jefferson saw them as grand wastes of space. Alcove beds were his new idea, too, fine for saving floor space, fine for Jefferson, whose alcove bed faced both his bedroom and his study, fine if a sleeper wanted to feel cocooned, not fine for a couple. Whoever is next to the wall has to climb over a body if a late-night trip to the loo is needed, and Monticello did have indoor privies, an innovation.

Jefferson died in a canyon-size financial hole. His daughter Martha sold Monticello, most of its furniture, and its slaves. It went to a silkworm farmer who failed and then to Uriah Phillips Levy, a Navy commodore and Philadelphia Jew with Savannah roots who’d admired Jefferson’s fight for religious liberty. The Levy family owned it for nearly 90 years and kept it at least from collapsing through Confederate confiscation and sale, a Levy lawsuit to get it back, turmoil within the Levy clan, and a campaign in the early 1910s by the nutty wife of a prominent New York lawyer demanding that the house be confiscated because the Levys were Jews. Once a foundation finally bought it, the search was on for Jefferson’s things and for a clear understanding of how the house and garden looked after he returned in 1809, when his term as president ended.

I asked one of the longtime curators what acquisition in her time at Monticello filled her with the most pride. I wasn’t surprised when she said Jefferson’s gold watch key, on view in his bedroom. Curators like precious, offbeat, but decisive things, and his watch key, in private hands, was intimate, personal, and used by him every day. He commissioned it after his wife, Martha, died in 1782, after ten years of marriage and six children. Jefferson was crushed. Besides, she extracted from him a pledge never to remarry, not wanting her children to have a wicked stepmother. The watch key has a lock of her hair in the oval frame on top of the mechanism.

The visitor center and, I suspect, most of the public tours, make too much of Jefferson as enslaver. The docents compose their own tours and seem well informed and learned, but everyone at Monticello is a creature of our times, so slavery must be addressed. Jefferson and slavery are yoked. I’m a creature of our times, too, and can’t say I care that much that slaves were involved in building Monticello, that Jefferson owned around 200 when he died, 600 over his lifetime, and that he didn’t free them en masse at his death as did Washington, and that he might have made one his decades-long concubine. And, as the cherry on top of the shame sundae, Sally Hemings was the daughter of Jefferson’s father-in-law and thus his late wife’s half-sister.

Wasn’t Jefferson a hypocrite, being Mr. All Men Are Created Equal? Yes, but the moralist and maximist La Rochefoucauld told us in 1665 that “hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue,” and we know Jefferson loved all things French. Hypocrisy’s as old as humanity and almost an instinct. It’s alive and well today and a haut-bourgeois staple. I’ll paraphrase Augustine and add “Lord make me good but not yet,” the devout Episcopalian’s asterisk to the Ten Commandments. Without slavery to buttress his fortune, Jefferson knew, or thought he knew, that he wouldn’t and couldn’t be Jefferson. And Jefferson was a master politician through and through.

Who is demanding this? Harping on slavery is tiresome and, worse, a sign that pious finger-waggers have lost the plot. Jefferson was a creature of his time, too. Why is he at the heart and soul of the Revolution and its aftermath? That’s the enduring message people want to know. The only dimension I’ll add comes from my years in political life and a lifetime of watching politicians closely, especially limousine liberals of whom Jefferson was an early model. They think they’ve done so much for humanity that they shouldn’t have to live by the standards they espouse. That’s hypocrisy sauced with entitlement and self-regard. Jefferson put it well when he said, “The art of life is the art of avoiding pain.” Giving up the life of luxury he loved so much, his books, his music, his French tastes, his status, his hospitable nature, and his extraordinary wine cellar would’ve been too painful for him to bear. “What would you have done? And be honest.” That’s the pregnant question, but I’m there to look at the history and the house Jefferson made and enjoy the splendid stewardship of it by Monticello’s staff and donors.