Oct 22, 2006 - 02:05:35 CDT
So far in this column, I've never written about Thomas Jefferson. Today, at the head of a group of 30 cultural tourists, I visited Monticello near Charlottesville, Va.I've studied the life and achievement of Thomas Jefferson for more than 20 years now. In fact, I've spent more time thinking about Jefferson than about anything else in the world. It's been a decades-long relationship, almost a marriage, with anniversaries, good years and bad, periods of historical passion and several bouts of the seven-year itch. But today, for the 20th time, I made the pilgrimage to Jefferson's fortress of solitude on a mountaintop in the piedmont of Virginia.
It was love at first sight all over again. Isn't that what we all want from our relationships?
Jefferson was not the greatest president in American history. He was not, in my view, even one of the top five (Lincoln; FDR; Theodore Roosevelt; Washington; Andrew Jackson). But I do certainly believe that Jefferson was the most interesting man who was ever president of the United States. Jefferson was a Renaissance man who could read ancient Greek texts in the original without a dictionary, write a pioneering treatise in paleontology (the megalonyx), pen some of the most elegant and lucid letters in the English language, and invent a moldboard plowshare so perfect in design that it has not been bettered in the 200 years since - except in materials. (I could have varied that sentence a hundred ways without exhausting Jefferson's breathtaking achievement).
It was wonderful to watch the 30 people in my group visit Monticello for the first time. I had the opportunity to see the house through their delight. I felt, as if for the first time, their sense of wonder, almost awe, as they looked at the world as Jefferson refashioned it for his happiness and efficiency. "There was a daily beauty in his life," as Shakespeare puts it, which makes everyone who visits his home want to live better. As I wandered through the house, overwhelmed by his creativity, I thought maybe I could become rational, organized and efficient; maybe I can be my best self more of the time. One of my college professors used to say, "In American secular culture, George Washington is God the Father, Lincoln is God the Son, and Thomas Jefferson is the Holy Spirit." That seems precisely right.
The most frequently asked question I get about Jefferson is: did he ever sleep? Jefferson's answer? It's not how much you sleep, it's how well you use your waking hours that determines the quality of your life.
When I first visited Monticello in the early '80s, the guides primly refused to talk about (or even entertain) questions relating to Sally Hemings, Jefferson's supposed slave mistress. Fawn Brodie's groundbreaking book, "Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate Biography" (1974) was banned from the gift shop and Brodie was denounced violently - to her face - at national history conferences. The docents spoke of Jefferson's "servants" and "help" rather than his slaves or, as they are now called, "enslaved persons." The whole Monticello discourse back then was reverential, and the guides spoke of "Mr. Jefferson" as if he were in the next room suffering from a migraine headache.
Needless to say, that era has gone with the wind. These days, the docents volunteer that it is "almost certain that Jefferson fathered several children with Sally Hemings," and they smile patiently when diehards argue that the DNA evidence is inconclusive. Under the outstanding leadership of Dan Jordan, Monticello has become one of the best-administered and enlightened historical sites in America. Jordan has made sure that Monticello is pro-active on questions of American Indians, gender, and, particularly, slavery. These days the docents make sure that nobody passes through the house without being made aware that the gap between Jefferson's idealism and his behavior in the arena of race and slavery puts him in a very inconsistent - indeed hypocritical - light, and that his inability or reluctance to come to terms with slavery is a significant blot upon his historical reputation.
We visited the great man's shrine on a rainy fall day. The house was shrouded in fog. It was barely visible as we stood waiting for our turn to make the tour. All the dense foliage around the house, on top of the mountain, dripped through the day. The light in the gigantic terraced vegetable garden (1,000 feet long by 20 yards wide) was exquisite: the red earth cradling hopelessly green vegetables, a splash of late-season red among the peppers and tomatoes. The garden pavilion in which Jefferson sat watching his vegetables grow, reading, in any of seven languages, one of the 7,000 books he had purchased for his library, is a mere Monticello outbuilding, but it is more beautiful than any home in which I've ever lived.
Of all the historic houses in the United States, including Roosevelt's Sagamore Hill on Long Island, Washington's Mount Vernon, and, say, the Custer House at Fort Abraham Lincoln, Monticello is the one that most clearly reflects the character and genius of its inhabitant. A visitor, Anna Thornton, who turned up with her husband the architect and her friends James and Dolley Madison, said the place was whimsical and "droll," and that the serene Jefferson seemed to be happy to dwell in an unfinished house that was more a creative builder's laboratory than a true home.
Monticello is an 11,000-square-foot home, with 43 rooms, 13 skylights, woodwork featuring classical motifs, beds curiously tucked into alcoves, exquisite parquet floors, trick doors, lazy susans, a wine dumbwaiter, a staircase that is little more than a step ladder, a seven-day weighted clock that is too big for the room that houses it, pioneering double sash windows, and - of course - a dome that is as magical as it is functionally useless.
It was a house that a genius designed and black slaves built.
Of all the words one might associate with Jefferson - such as reformer, politician, farmer, diplomat, etc. - the one that seems best to epitomize him is creative artist. Profoundly well read, curious about almost everything under the sun, indefatigably self-disciplined, certain that virtually everything in the world can be improved through reason and good sense, Jefferson constantly tinkered with the world around him, from the national coinage (which he transformed into a decimal system) to the science of library classification.
"The greatest service which can be rendered any country," Jefferson wrote, "is to add a useful plant to its culture."
Some historians have argued that he did more to invent America than any other individual. He wrote the Declaration of Independence - America's idealistic blueprint. He crafted the phrase "wall of separation between church and state" - the best summary of the purpose of the First Amendment. He revised the entire law code of Virginia. He created a university in Virginia that continues to serve as the model for all public universities in the United States. And on and on and on.
And of course Jefferson was the foremost champion of what North Dakota was to become between 1889 and sometime in the last years of the 20th century - the nation's premier family farm state. "Those who labor in the earth," he wrote, "are the chosen people of God if ever he had a chosen people." As we retreat from Jefferson's vision into a post-agrarian future, it seems to me that North Dakota is becoming a steadily less remarkable society.
In the entryway at Monticello, in what Jefferson called his "Indian gallery," we saw reconstructions of some of the artifacts that Lewis and Clark gathered in the American West, and sent or carried back to the president.
At the time there was no national museum to house these treasures, so Jefferson gave the majority of them to his friend Charles Willson Peale of Philadelphia. Most of the artifacts perished in the 200 years following the return of Lewis and Clark.
The "replacement" artifacts, new but completely authentic, were crafted by Butch Thunder Hawk and Dennis Fox at the United Tribes Technical College in Bismarck.
(Clay Jenkinson is the Theodore Roosevelt scholar-in-residence at Dickinson State University. Jenkinson lives in Bismarck. E-mail him at Jeffysage@;aol.com.)
Bobbie Talso wrote on Oct 27, 2006 4:33 PM:
Okie from ND wrote on Oct 26, 2006 2:21 PM:
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