The Founders at Home: The Building of America, 1735-1817
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However decisive a step, the American Revolution did not achieve all the perfectibility of which man is capable—as how could it, since no one can foresee what heights mankind might reach? To progress further, men’s minds must be left free to experiment and invent. “Reason and free inquiry,” Jefferson pronounced, “are the only effectual agents against error,” and, by implication, the wilderness of prejudice and superstition will shrink as the empire of reason grows.31 Accordingly, he didn’t believe that Americans should hold even their own Constitution “too sacred to be touched.” No “society can make a perpetual constitution, or even a perpetual law,” for “laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths disclosed, and manners and opinions change with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also, and keep pace with the times.” In his most extreme mood, he believed that all the laws should expire after each generation, to be made anew every nineteen years. “We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy, as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors”—even ancestors such as the Founders, to whom we now ascribe “a wisdom more than human, and suppose what they did to be beyond amendment. I knew that age well; I belonged to it, and labored with it,” he wrote in old age. “It was very like the present, but without the experience of the present; and forty years of experience in government is worth a century of book-reading.” So, since “the earth belongs to the living and not to the dead,” once one generation has passed into history, the next “may change their laws and institutions to suit themselves. Nothing then is unchangeable but the inherent and unalienable rights of man.”32
THAT IMPLACABLE SPIRIT of Enlightenment inquiry pervades Monticello in a way that dawns on you only gradually as you walk through the rooms. The house seems to be saying, as Goethe cried on his deathbed, More light! It’s not just that there are few dark corners in a house made up of so many demi-octagons, but that Jefferson has designed it so that light pours in from everywhere—through oversized, triple-hung windows and lots of them, through glass doors, through multiple skylights made up of glass louvers that let in the sunshine but keep out the rain, all reflected and bounced back across the lofty rooms by mirrors everywhere, from huge ones in the parlor to mirrored panes in the two round windows flanking the door into the dome, where the building itself would have obscured clear glass ones. Nowhere is the flood of light more intense than in Monticello’s exaggeratedly high dressing room, its ceiling mostly glass louvers. One can imagine the lanky Jefferson getting out of his bed between his cabinet and dressing room as soon as he could see the clock that hung at the bottom of his sleeping alcove, rinsing his feet as he did every morning in the basin of cold water that has stained the dressing-room floor, and bathing in light.
When he left the presidency in 1809 and returned to his native state, which he never again left, Jefferson threw himself into a new scheme for enlightening his fellow citizens—the University of Virginia, of which he was not just the founder and rector but also served as its campus architect, construction supervisor, curriculum designer, faculty recruiter, and chief lobbyist with the state legislature.33 This “hobby of my old age,” Jefferson said, “will be based on the illimitable freedom of the human mind to explore and to expose every subject susceptible of its contemplation.”34 As architecture, it is breathtaking, a work of genius; beside its purity and delicacy even McKim, Mead & White’s later buildings, at a respectful distance, seem ponderous and flabby. Jefferson aimed to make the connected pavilions of his “academical village,” each based on a different Roman model as built or drawn by Palladio, “models of taste and good architecture, . . . no two alike, so as to serve as specimens for the architectural lectures.”35 And indeed vast numbers of American houses for the next half century seem to spring straight out of his designs.
But as an intellectual enterprise the university proved less satisfactory to its creator when it opened the year before he died. The students turned out to be not so much an aristocracy of virtue and talent as a gang of rowdy youths with a taste for drink, gambling, breaking windows, firing guns into the air, and thrashing professors who tried to stop them. The horrified Jefferson came down from his mountain to Charlottesville to reprimand them. Flanked by his dear friends and fellow trustees James Madison and James Monroe, the frail eighty-two-year-old patriarch drew himself up to his full six foot two, began to speak—and burst into tears.36
AT MONTICELLO, too, that temple of Enlightenment, there were dark spots. In Palladian fashion, two pavilions flank the main house, connected by L-shaped wings, which from the front appear to be low terraces, made for promenades. From the back, because of the mountain’s slope, you can see that the wings are in fact covered passages that lead out of the cellar of the house and contain the semi-subterranean kitchen, dairy, and other rooms for those who waited on Jefferson. Since those latter were slaves, it’s hard not to walk through these passages without thinking of H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine, with its airy, playful creatures of light enjoying the surface of the earth, while the dark Morlocks toil hidden beneath the surface, not to be spoken of.
Everyone knows about Monticello’s gadgets—the cannonball-weighted clock visible both inside and outside the house; the double doors that open at one touch, thanks to a figure-of-eight pulley joining them beneath the floorboards; the space-saving clothes closet built in above the alcove bed. But two of this inspired tinkerer’s most famous contrivances—the little dumbwaiters hidden on either side of the dining-room fireplace to bring bottles of wine up from the cellar, and the lazy Susan pantry door on whose shelves platters of food could be laid and then rotated into the dining room—seem designed to keep the slaves out of sight and out of mind, hiding even from its master the grim reality on which Monticello rested.37
From the start of his public life, slavery was the circle Jefferson couldn’t square. His wealth depended on it—without slaves, southern land was much less valuable—but he knew the institution was evil. True, he believed blacks to be an inferior race, genetically low in intelligence and without the capacity to assimilate that he ascribed to Indians.38 (When, to refute Jefferson’s assertions of black inferiority, an ex-slave and self-taught mathematician sent him a complex almanac of his own devising, Jefferson concluded that the man must have had help.)39 Even so, with unflinching logic, Jefferson insisted that selling men into slavery was a “cruel war against human nature itself, violating it’s most sacred rights of life and liberty,” as he said in a passage condemning George III for not ending the slave trade that his fellow congressmen edited out of the Declaration of Independence.40 “Whatever be their degree of talent it is no measure of their rights,” he wrote of slaves. “Because Sir Isaac Newton was superior to others in understanding, he was not therefore lord of the person or property of others.”41 Slaves are men; all men are created equal; QED.
Slavery didn’t just contravene America’s fundamental principle of liberty but subverted it, Jefferson believed. “Can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the gift of God?” he wrote. “That they are not to be violated but with His wrath?”42 If our liberty rests on self-evident propositions rather than musty parchments, what happens to freedom when the propositions no longer seem so self-evident—when beliefs, which are as powerful as institutions, begin to waver?
JEFFERSON WRESTLED with this problem beginning with his first House of Burgesses term, when the twenty-six-year-old newly fledged lawyer tried (and failed) to make it legal for Virginians to free their slaves. In 1778 he persuaded the state legislature to ban further importation of slaves. He believed that the institution could be limited and then gradually eradicated, after which the slaves would be expatriated—largely because their owners would have much to fear from their resentment. And jus
tly: “The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other,” he wrote.43 The American slave owner who fought for independence inflicts “on his fellow men a bondage, one hour of which is fraught with more misery than ages of that which he rose in rebellion to oppose. . . . When the measure of their tears shall be full, when their groans shall have involved heaven itself in darkness,” Jefferson wrote in words that prefigure Lincoln’s prophetic Second Inaugural, “doubtless a god of justice will awaken to their distress, and by diffusing light & liberality among their oppressors, or at length by his exterminating thunder, manifest his attention to the things of this world, and that they are not to be left to the guidance of a blind fatality.”44
As a member of Congress under the Articles of Confederation, Jefferson strove to ban slavery in any new states carved out of the western territory won from Britain in the Revolution, but a sick delegate didn’t show up to cast the vote needed for victory.45 Four decades later, when Congress did exactly the opposite and passed the 1820 Missouri Compromise, permitting slavery in Missouri and in any new states formed in the southern part of his Louisiana Territory, he was aghast, hearing it as “a fire bell in the night” that “filled me with terror,” for “I considered it at once as the knell of the Union.” He correctly predicted that the antagonism of slavery and antislavery factions would spark a nationwide conflagration. Though he held fast to his original solution, he no longer thought it would come to pass. The slave-owning states, he ruefully concluded, “have the wolf by the ears, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other.”46
SO WHAT TO MAKE of Jefferson’s relationship with Sally Hemings, which has come to symbolize the conflict, tragic to some and merely hypocritical to others, between America’s highest ideals and its slave-holding Founding Fathers—a conflict that Jefferson fully recognized and that Irish poet Tom Moore satirized as early as 1806, when he jeered at President Jefferson as “the patriot” who liked to “dream of freedom in his bondsmaid’s arms”?47 The Hemings family, whom Jefferson had inherited when his father-in-law’s death left him one of Virginia’s biggest slave owners, made up almost all of Monticello’s household staff, probably because they were so light-skinned that visitors mistook them for white.48 The Hemings matriarch, Betty, was said to be half white, the daughter of an English sea captain, and many of her children had white fathers, including Sally, the daughter of Jefferson’s own father-in-law, John Wayles.49 Such was the state of race relations on the eighteenth-century Virginia plantation.
DNA tests showing that Sally’s youngest son had a Jefferson father, cross-checked with records showing which Jefferson men were at Monticello nine months before each child’s birth, suggest that Sally’s son Madison Hemings was most likely correct in alleging in a lengthy 1873 newspaper interview that his mother had been Jefferson’s “concubine,” and that he and his siblings were Jefferson’s children.50 The story he told is this. Jefferson had sent for his eight-year-old daughter, Polly, to join him in France in 1787, and her thirteen- or fourteen-year-old nursemaid, Sally, brought her across the ocean, one little girl in charge of another. When Jefferson was to return to America shortly after the fall of the Bastille, the pregnant Sally refused to come, since French law made her free. Jefferson promised her special privileges if she would return, and vowed to free her unborn child and any others she might have at twenty-one, a promise he kept with the four children who reached adulthood. And all Sally’s children bore Jefferson-connected names, unlike Monticello’s other slaves.51
No one can know the nature of their relationship, which some eminent historians and social scientists still believe was not sexual.52 But, in addition to the DNA data, Jefferson was sufficiently hot-blooded in a propriety-breaking way to have tried vigorously but unsuccessfully to seduce a neighbor’s wife, nearly sparking a duel, and, except for his infatuation with Maria Cosway, we hear nothing of any other woman in his life after Martha’s death but Sally.53 She lived in one of Monticello’s semi-underground rooms and looked after Jefferson’s apartments and wardrobe, very light work. The only two extant eyewitness accounts describe her as “decidedly good looking” and “mighty near white”—three-quarters white, in fact—with “long straight hair down her back.”54 Some historians opine, on no evidence, that she must have looked like her half sister, Jefferson’s beloved wife Martha, whose deathbed she and her mother (who had helped raise Martha) never left, while the faint and grief-stricken Jefferson, then thirty-nine, had to be carried to his room.55 Perhaps the widower loved Sally in Martha’s place, they theorize. Perhaps she welcomed the attentions of her powerful and fascinating master.56
One hopes so; but it’s all speculation. One can’t forget Jefferson’s own description of the master-slave relationship, with despotism on one side and submissions on the other—written to be sure before Sally arrived in Paris. Nor can one forget that Jefferson’s greatest anxiety—panic, almost—about having Polly cross the ocean was that she might be captured by the Barbary pirates, then holding twenty-two Americans in slavery. “My mind revolts at the possibility of a capture,” he wrote, as well it might, since he knew what slavery meant.57
WHEN YOU COMPARE the houses of Virginia’s other Founding Fathers to Monticello, what strikes you is how they’ve grown up organically, the products of historical development. You can see George Washington’s increasing importance written all over Mount Vernon, for example, as his father’s story-and-a-half house grew inexorably bigger and more presidential. Similarly, you can read James Madison’s history in Montpelier, as he built a private four-room extension for himself and his new bride onto his parents’ house, like a duplex town house in a modern condo development, and then added a ceremonial portal when he became president.
Monticello, by contrast, looks like the product of a single, unified conception, springing from Jefferson’s brain like Athena from the head of Zeus. It didn’t, of course. It was over fifty years in the making: Jefferson and his wife began their ten years of marriage in one of the little pavilions, basically a studio apartment with a basement kitchen, all that then existed of Monticello.58 Jefferson kept changing his mind about what he wanted, especially after he returned from his four years in Paris, filled with visions of French neoclassicism and smitten with the Roman Maison Carrée at Nîmes, which he gazed at “whole hours,” he said, “like a lover at his mistress.”59 He tore down walls, designed historically accurate details in all the classical orders, extended porticoes, moved stone columns, enlarging and perfecting. “Putting up and pulling down [is] one of my favorite amusements,” he commented, with the result that for years he found himself “living in a brick-kiln,” with unplastered walls.60 But he produced something transcendent, like Palladio’s villas or Lord Burlington’s Chiswick House.
The years of turmoil to reach this result make one reconsider skeptically his description of the American Founding as “a beautiful example of a government reformed by reason alone, without bloodshed.” What about the years when Washington’s men froze and starved trying to outlast British armies that chased them for six hundred miles? As Jefferson’s experience building Monticello should have taught him, nothing springs forth like a fully formed Platonic ideal. Yes, there is a self-evident right to liberty, but it took six years of bloodshed to establish that right in the New World. And many of those fighting believed they were safeguarding not an abstract idea of liberty but the historical liberty that they had enjoyed during five or more generations of self-rule in America and that belonged to them as free-born Englishmen, protected by such “musty records” as Magna Carta.
There is a certain otherworldliness to Jefferson’s political philosophy (compared with his bursts of hardheaded pragmatism as president). But one remembers that he did not fight in the Revolution, since he was serving as Virginia’s governor. An unintentionally funny story h
e tells about having dinner with Alexander Hamilton and John Adams in New York in 1791 perfectly encapsulates this quality. Hamilton gestured toward Jefferson’s beloved portraits of Bacon, Newton, and Locke, and asked who they were. “[My] trinity of the three greatest men the world had ever produced,” Jefferson replied, naming them. Hamilton paused a moment. “‘The greatest man,’ said he, ‘that ever lived was Julius Caesar.’”61 The aghast Jefferson took this crack as yet one more proof of the antirepublicanism and monarchism he ascribed to Hamilton. But most likely Hamilton was having fun pricking Jefferson’s piety, reminding him that statecraft isn’t a matter of reason alone.
Jefferson’s casualness about how the ideal actually gets made into reality, his willingness to put up and tear down and put up again, and live oblivious to the rubble meanwhile, rather than to extend and update what already exists, led him to another political obliviousness, this one bloody rather than bloodless: his ardent support of the French Revolution, which broke out several weeks before he returned home to become secretary of state. He even helped Lafayette draft the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen.
As the revolution lurched leftward and the Terror sent some of the uprising’s early, moderate supporters—Jefferson’s close friends—to the guillotine, his support did not waver. He deplored his friends’ deaths, but the “liberty of the whole earth was depending on the issue of the contest,” he averred. They were like battlefield casualties, who “would never have hesitated to give up their lives” for the goal that was at stake—though it was their supposed friends who had killed them, not their enemies. “My own affections have been deeply wounded by some of the martyrs to this cause,” Jefferson wrote, “but rather than it should have failed, I would have seen half the earth desolated. Were there but an Adam and an Eve left in every country, and left free, it would be better than as it is now.”62 As Burke said of the French revolutionaries and their effort to rebuild the world from scratch according to their idea of reason alone, without regard for history, prudence, or human life, “In the groves of their academy, at the end of every visto, you see nothing but the gallows.”63