Sep 21, 2008 - 04:05:19 CDT
As often as I can, I make the pilgrimage to Thomas Jefferson's Virginia and take the tour of Monticello. Last week, I had the joy of visiting Jefferson's mountaintop retreat with the new president of Dickinson State University, Richard McCallum.Of all the historic homes I have ever visited, Monticello is the one that most clearly reflects the personality and value system of its owner. Shakespeare's birthplace at Stratford-upon-Avon is a wonderful shrine to Britain's greatest writer, but you cannot discover the seeds of "Hamlet" or "King Lear" in that provincial cottage.
The minute you walk into the entrance hall at Monticello, however, you start to "get" Jefferson. The two-story foyer is a kind of museum of Jefferson's enthusiasms: lavish maps, statuary, artifacts from the Lewis and Clark Expedition, bones of the mastodon, the interior dial of a wind vane and the famous weighted calendar clock that not only tells the time of the day but the day of the week.
In his private suite of rooms, Jefferson housed telescopes, sextants and octants, his polygraph (an elegant but extremely low-tech Xerox machine), and his immense library of almost 7,000 volumes, all surrounding a swivel chair he designed with an accompanying chaise lounge.
A visitor early in Jefferson's presidency called his mountain home "droll." That's a perfect description of America's most famous eccentric. The house is filled with trick closets and secret passages and optical illusions-a wine bottle dumbwaiter, a gorgeous parquet floor so intricate that it drove his contractor to distraction, alcove beds, triple sash windows that can be used as doorways, a passive air-transfer air-conditioning system. Jefferson modestly called these innovations "gimcracks," but he clearly poured a great deal of his creative energy into making his house a reflection of his personality and his immense intellectual curiosity.
If I were wealthy, I'd put a dome on my house and build a Mandan earthlodge in my backyard. Or, if I emulated Jefferson, I'd just buy it all on credit and try to out-minuet my creditors.
Jefferson's achievement was so spectacular that everyone who studies him wonders when or, for that matter, if, he slept. He knew seven languages, including Latin, Greek and Anglo-Saxon, which he studied not to read "Beowulf" (eminently worth doing), but because he believed democracy began among the Germanic tribes of northern Europe. He kept five daily diaries - a garden book, an account book, a farm book, a weather log and a correspondence log. He designed the Virginia State Capitol - one of the most beautiful and influential in American history - his two homes, Monticello and Poplar Forest, and the University of Virginia, "the hobby of my old age."
In some important ways, he also "invented" America, and not only on July 4, 1776. Jefferson's influence on the history of North Dakota, for example, is almost incalculably large. He bought about 60 percent of it from Napoleon. He influenced its size, gridded it out with the rectangular survey system of square miles and section lines he devised in 1784, sent one his proteges to explore it and establish the patterns of white-Indian relations in the Louisiana Territory, created the model for its university campuses and crafted the mission statement for the first century of North Dakota life: "Those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God." The fact that North Dakota is nearly a perfect rectangle (drat that Red River) is all Jefferson. If he had had his way, every western state would be square and identical in size.
During our visit to Monticello, which had to do with the digitization of historical documents, Dr. McCallum and I were able to call on the retiring president of the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation.
Dan Jordan has had one of America's most fabulous jobs for the last 23 years. During his tenure, Monticello created programming to observe the 250th birthday of Jefferson and the bicentennial of the Lewis and Clark Expedition. It founded the Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies as well as the Jefferson Library, which serves as a model for what Dickinson State University is trying to create with its proposed Theodore Roosevelt Center.
Monticello has also taken on the publication of "The Papers of Thomas Jefferson: Retirement Series," which, in approximately 23 volumes, will provide a definitive scholarly edition of all the extant letters Jefferson wrote and received between 1809 and July 4, 1826, when he died simultaneously with his friend and sometime rival, John Adams.
All these are important contributions to the world of Thomas Jefferson. They have effectively transformed Monticello from a historic home into a serious engine of Jefferson discourse.
But, in my opinion, Jordan's greatest achievement has been to manage a historic adjustment in the nation's attitude toward Thomas Jefferson. When I first started thinking about Jefferson half a lifetime ago, he was at the apex of his historical reputation. Everyone knew that there was a problem of "Jefferson and slavery," but back then he was regarded as an unbelievably gifted statesman and creative artist - America's Renaissance man -who was a reluctant politician and an even more reluctant slave holder.
That was then.
Today, in most circles, Jefferson is regarded as a racist, a contemptible hypocrite on the issue of slavery (and several other fronts), a cheerful but ruthless dispossessor of American Indians from their sovereign lands and a Machiavellian politician who, like Richard Nixon, was willing to "screw his political enemies," chiefly Alexander Hamilton and John Adams.
Dan Jordan does not subscribe to this sour portrait of the "fallen" Jefferson, but he has not, like diehard Jefferson defenders, tried to turn his back on the dark side of a very great man. He has made Monticello pro-active on the problem of slavery and even Sally Hemings. Under Jordan's enlightened leadership, a great deal has been done to illuminate the lives and difficulties of Jefferson's "enslaved people," as they are now more often called. He has made sure plantation tour guides are forthcoming about Jefferson's paralysis over his ownership of fellow - presumably equal - human beings.
On our tour the other day, our docent, a white Southern woman in her late 50s, introduced the subject of Sally Hemings in the dining room. Recent DNA tests, she reported, have led the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation to conclude that Jefferson was the father of at least one of Sally Hemings' children. The crowd nodded without a single twitch or snigger.
Twenty-five years ago, that would have been unthinkable. Back then, guides called Jefferson's 200 slaves his "people," and they angrily dismissed biographer Fawn Brodie's "outrageous" claim that Jefferson had a long-term sexual relationship with one of his slave women.
Instead of trying to make Monticello the last holdout for the discredited heroic myth of Jefferson, a kind of Jeffersonian Alamo, Jordan has made it a national model of how to come to terms with the historical record for what it actually reveals rather than for what makes us feel good about ourselves, our heroes and our history.
Like Jefferson, Jordan now has earned his nunc dimittis. He will be very much missed.
(Clay Jenkinson is the director of the Dakota Institute. He is also the Theodore Roosevelt Scholar-in-residence at Dickinson State University. He lives in Bismarck. Contact Clay at Jeffysage@;aol.com.)
Herbert Barger wrote on Oct 9, 2008 11:26 AM:
Herb Barger
Jefferson Family Historian
Founder, Thomas Jefferson Heritage Society
Asst. to Dr. E.A. Foster on the Jefferson-Hemings DNA Study "
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