by Myron Magnet
Park Service architectural preservation chief Stephen Spaulding’s crew scraped away dozens of layers of paint to discover the original pale yellow of the drawing-room and dining-room walls, and they discovered, by taking down plaster, that early descriptions of the dining room, with three mirrored doors echoing the ten-foot-tall bow window at the room’s other end and reflecting its view, are correct. They even found the doors, which had been glued together to form one thick door. A young architect, realizing no 1802 door was that heavy, pried apart the pieces, to reveal the marks of the glazing bars that had held the original mirrored panels in place. Now restored, with new mirrors made from early-nineteenth-century glass backed with silver, they gleam ethereally. Though made of wood, the house is more strongly built than it appears, with a layer of brick just inside the outer walls, and a layer of plaster between the first-story ceiling and the second-story floor, to keep out vermin. Shielded for a hundred years by the two neighboring buildings, most of the original, handblown windowpanes are intact. The second floor, still containing what looks like Hamilton’s washstand, is largely unrestored: to install an elevator would ruin the architecture, and the Americans with Disabilities Act decrees that if everyone can’t access someplace in certain buildings, no one can.134
Park Service curators have found the delicate London-made Clementi square piano that Angelica Hamilton used to play, five of the original French-style drawing-room chairs, Hamilton’s pair of demilune card tables, and the long, mirrored plateau that stood at the center of the dining-room table reflecting the candlelight up to the cheerful guests’ faces. They’ve made beautifully crafted reproductions of Hamilton’s rolltop desk and of his silver-plated ice bucket, the original of which a Hamilton descendant recently sold out of New York to an Arkansas collector. To me it seems the Holy Grail of American history, an artifact laden with consecrated meaning: for it arrived at Hamilton’s door when the scandal over the Maria Reynolds affair was at its height and he badly needed some support. In the box, he found this note: “Not for any intrinsic value the thing possesses, but as a token of my sincere regard and friendship for you and as a rememberancer of me; I pray you to accept a Wine cooler for four bottles. . . . It is one of four I imported in the early part of my late Administration of the Government; two only of which were ever used. I pray you to present my best wishes, in which Mrs. Washington joins me, to Mrs. Hamilton & the family; and that you would be persuaded, that with every sentiment of the highest regard, I remain your sincere friend and Affectionate Hble. Servant Go: Washington.”135
Hamilton Grange Main Floor
Drawing courtesy of John G. Waite Associates, Architects PLLC
He understood better than anyone the man’s incomparable worth.
8
Thomas Jefferson: Monticello’s Shadows
IN THE SUMMER OF 1786, still mourning his beloved wife’s death four years earlier and soon to begin sleeping with her fifteen-year-old half sister, his slave Sally Hemings, Thomas Jefferson fell in love with a beautiful English painter named Maria Cosway. Head over heels in love: for the forty-three-year-old minister to France tried to impress the twenty-something Maria by jumping a fence, and the resulting dislocated wrist troubled him the rest of his life.1 With his good hand, he wrote Maria a 4,500-word love letter, a half-mock philosophical “dialogue” in which his “Head” contends that he should have stuck to “intellectual pleasures” that “ride serene & sublime above the concerns of this mortal world,” while his “Heart” replies, in highly charged terms, that the happiness of love is worth the pain of loss, and that “the solid pleasure of one generous spasm of the heart” outweighs all the philosopher’s “frigid speculations.”2 The letter, whose stated conflict stands for an unspoken conflict over Jefferson’s love for a married woman, goes on to spin a fantasy that one day Maria will come and stay with him at Monticello, the mountaintop architectural masterpiece near Charlottesville, Virginia, that is the outward embodiment of this Enlightenment magus’s brilliant mind. And like the letter to Maria, it too reveals the deep conflicts between its author’s intellectual Head and the confused, darker realities that his philosophy can’t resolve.
Thomas Jefferson Foundation, Inc., at Monticello
To walk through the house is to feel oneself in a microcosm of Jefferson’s conception of the universe, a complex order whose parts mesh precisely, as one sees once one grasps the plan. With blueprint in hand I wandered from room to room, figuring out how the octagons fit together with the squares and rectangles to compose the balanced recessions and projections of the brick exterior, glowing deep red in the hot summer sunshine, beneath the sparkling white pediments and dome. You can’t feel closer to the Great Watchmaker of the eighteenth-century philosophers than in the demi-octagon of Jefferson’s study, or “cabinet,” with its beautifully crafted brass models of the universe—an armillary sphere whose rings show how the stars revolve over the earth, and an orrery, a clockwork model of the solar system in which tiny planets revolve around a little brass sun. Next to them stand a brass-mounted telescope and microscope to peer into the workings of that universe, along with compasses and other instruments to map out its structure.
Jefferson built his house on a mountaintop so that he could “look down into the workhouse of nature, to see her clouds, hail, snow, rain, thunder, all fabricated at our feet! and the glorious sun, when rising as if out of a distant water, just gilding the tops of the mountains, & giving life to all nature!”3 Such a late-eighteenth-century taste for the sublime didn’t come cheap: Jefferson had to level the mountaintop to construct his house, and water, building materials, and supplies were costly and slow to get to the summit.4 But sitting in Monticello’s always cool and breezy garden pavilion and looking out over the rolling clouds and Blue Ridge mountains below, as Jefferson liked to do, you can see why he took the trouble.
In the parlor, a different set of precision instruments, a superb London-made harpsichord and a little American piano, speak of the many evenings when Jefferson, a keen violinist, together with his musical daughters, filled the house with the eighteenth-century compositions whose complex architecture weaves an order and harmony that intimates another, transcendent, order and harmony. Certainly Jefferson intuited that higher order. “[W]hen we take a view of the Universe,” he wrote, “it is impossible for the human mind not to perceive and feel a conviction of design, consummate skill, and indefinite power in every atom of it’s composition. The movements of the heavenly bodies, so exactly held in their course by the balance of centrifugal and centripetal forces; . . . insects mere atoms of life, yet as perfectly organised as man or mammoth . . . it is impossible, I say, for the human mind not to believe that there is, in all this, design, cause and effect, up to an ultimate cause, a fabricator of all things . . . , their preserver and regulator.”5
THIS IS A rational universe, and human reason can grasp its laws. Jefferson set out to know them as fully as possible. Just beyond his cabinet, his cozy book room formed as complete a repository of what philosophers and naturalists had discovered of those laws as America could then boast. Jefferson owned not just the works of his intellectual heroes—Locke, Newton, and Bacon, pioneers of scientific rationalism—but also their portraits, hung high on Monticello’s parlor walls. Assembled over fifty years from booksellers across Europe, the library became the nucleus of the Library of Congress when the debt-ridden ex-president had to sell its 6,487 volumes to the nation for $23,950 in 1814.6
He was especially proud of his book room’s works on America—dealing with “whatever belongs to the American statesman,” he boasted—and he turned Monticello’s airy two-story hall into a museum of Americana.7 Big maps of the country adorned the walls, including the first accurate one of Virginia as surveyed by his father. Prominently on display were the thighbone, jawbone, and tusk of a mastodon dug up in Kentucky—which clearly refuted, in Jefferson’s view, famed French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon’s derogatory theory that the productions of
nature had degenerated in the New World, so that plants, animals, and men were smaller, weaker, less various, less sexually ardent, and shorter-lived in the Americas than in Europe.8 Could Europe produce an animal so . . . mammoth? And how about the elk and moose, whose antlers bristled challengingly above the maps?
Most striking was Jefferson’s display of Indian objects—pipes and headdresses, spears and buffalo robes—many brought back by Lewis and Clark, whose epochal expedition to the Pacific he sent out in 1804 to plumb the vast lands gained in the Louisiana Purchase, his presidency’s greatest (if not wholly constitutional) achievement.9 Jefferson admired the Indians’ daring and eloquence, yet further refutation of Buffon’s degeneration theory, and he liked being “the Great Father.”10 He understood the Indians in terms of the Enlightenment theory of human “perfectibility,” the idea that man, having developed through barbarism to civilization, can achieve yet higher development of intellect and refinement.
In fact, he wrote toward the end of his life, a trip across the American continent is a “survey, in time, of the progress of man from the infancy of creation to the present day.” If a “philosophic observer” were to start with “the savages of the Rocky Mountains” and travel eastward, he would begin by seeing man “in the earliest stage of association living under no law but that of nature,” hunting animals for food and wearing their skins. He would next come upon men “in the pastoral state, raising domestic animals to supply the defects of hunting. Then succeed our own semi-barbarous citizens, the pioneers of the advance of civilization, and so in his progress he would meet the gradual shades of improving man until he would reach his, as yet, most improved state in our seaport towns. . . . I have observed this march of civilization advancing from the seacoast, passing over us like a cloud of light, increasing our knowledge and improving our condition. . . . And where this progress will stop no one can say.”11 As for the Indians, the sooner they join the march of progress the better. They need to give up their hunting and communal agriculture and settle down to a life of private property and individual farms, with arithmetic and writing to keep accounts.12 And to speed the process, as president he sent out Christian missionaries to teach them to be less Indian and more American—to the continuing consternation of today’s multiculturalists and strict separationists.13
IT’S TRUE that Jefferson had his moments of wanting to withdraw into “intellectual pleasures” that “ride serene & sublime above the concerns of this mortal world,” as he told Maria Cosway. His taste for unworldly abstraction is nowhere clearer than inside Monticello’s empty dome, a stupendous and costly exercise in pure geometry, breathtakingly beautiful with its giant, Michelangelesque baseboard and the light pouring in from its round windows and central oculus—but virtually unusable, because its echoes make conversation impossible, it is unheated, and its access is steep and narrow. Even the sumptuous mahogany double doors built for symmetry opposite the dome’s entrance open only onto a jumble of rafters and attics.
But usually Jefferson’s intellectual pleasures fully engage the world: for him, the increase of knowledge is meant to improve man’s condition. When Buffon “affected to consider chemistry but as cookery,” for instance, and to equate the laboratory with the kitchen, Jefferson took sharp issue; chemistry, he lectured the count, is “big with future discoveries for the utility and safety of the human race.”14 Did not people justly esteem “Dr. Franklin’s science because he always endeavored to direct it to something useful in private life”?15 Were not phosphorous matches, for example, a boon to mankind, and would not interchangeable musket parts, which he saw in France long before the Colt factory mass-produced them in America, change history?16
Jefferson was himself an amateur inventor who designed—purely by mathematical reasoning rather than by digging in the earth—a plow blade that needed less than half the pulling power of ordinary plows.17 In addition, he constantly sought seeds and plants from abroad, looking for better fruits and grains for Americans to grow, from rice that didn’t need disease-breeding paddies to olive trees and continental wine grapes that would flourish in the New World. Presiding over the senate as John Adams’s vice president and feeling the lack of a guide to parliamentary procedure, this compulsive improver wrote one that the House of Representatives still uses today.18
BUT IT WAS his special intellectual achievement—and that of the American Revolution, in his view—to use reason to bring the march of civilization to government. “We can surely boast of having set the world a beautiful example of a government reformed by reason alone, without bloodshed,” he wrote.19 “We had no occasion to search into musty records, to hunt up royal parchments, or to investigate the laws and institutions of a semi-barbarous ancestry. We appealed to those of nature, and found them engraved on our hearts.”20
What they found, of course, when they directed their power of reason to political matters, were the “self-evident” Lockean truths that no one could ever express with the exquisite economy and crystalline precision of Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence: “that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, & the pursuit of happiness: that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of those ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, & to institute new government.”21 People’s rights are not “the gift of their chief magistrate,” he wrote in his 1774 Summary View of the Rights of British America (over which that magistrate, George III, was still fuming twelve years later, when Jefferson met him), but are “derived from the laws of nature.” Moreover, “kings are the servants, not the proprietors of the people.”22
These truths were always true, but they were not always self-evident, since kings, aristocrats, and priests had obfuscated them. Intellectually, men had long slumbered in “the sleep of despotism,” their minds “shackled by habit and prejudice,” as Jefferson wrote of the French before their revolution.23 Not just external coercion but also a state of mind keeps people unfree: in the 1760s, for instance, the American colonists’ “minds were circumscribed within narrow limits by a habitual belief that it was our duty to be subordinate to the mother country,” and to this day the Indians have remained in “barbarism” because of their “bigotry” in favor of “the practices of [their] forefathers.”24 So a revolution involves reforming not just political and social institutions but also the minds of the citizenry. It was in this spirit that Jefferson famously declared: “I have sworn upon the altar of god, eternal hostility to every form of tyranny over the mind of man.”25 And in the last public letter he wrote, he was happy to say that “The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God.”26
Shortly after writing the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson left the Continental Congress to join the Virginia legislature, aiming to carry out, as a model for the rest of the states, a program of liberation “by which every fibre would be eradicated of ancient or future aristocracy and a foundation laid for a government truly republican.” He outlawed the inheritance practices of entail and primogeniture, which, by keeping land in the family and passing it undivided to the eldest son, served to perpetuate a landed aristocracy. He disestablished the Episcopal Church—though only from year to year until he succeeded permanently in 1779—on the ground that people had a natural freedom of opinion and should not be taxed to support a sect (and “the religion of the rich,” at that) they didn’t believe in.27 On the same ground, he later tried, unsuccessfully, to repeal the laws against heresy, since “the opinions of men are not the object of civil government, nor under its jurisdiction.”28
To wake up Virginians from the intellectual sleep of despotism, he envisioned an edu
cational system that would make every child literate and numerate in three years and then send the ablest kids to tough regional grammar schools. The best of those who made it through six grueling years there would go on to college at William and Mary. Since all this schooling would be at public expense, the talented poor could rise to the top—“the best geniuses will be raked from the rubbish,” as Jefferson put it—and the “aristocracy of wealth” would have to make room for “the aristocracy of virtue and talent, which nature has wisely provided for the direction of the interests of society, & scattered with an equal hand through all it’s conditions.”29 More crucially, the ordinary Virginian would be well enough educated to understand that he was a free man with equal rights, a citizen not a subject. That’s why a republic should fund education: “the tax which will be paid for this purpose,” argued Jefferson, a small-government libertarian in most other matters, “is not more than the thousandth part of what will be paid to kings, priests, and nobles who will rise up among us if we leave the people in ignorance.”30 But his fellow legislators voted down his plan.
