Presidential Home Retrospective: How Do You Solve a Problem Like Thomas Jefferson?

In which the author reminisces on previous presidential house visits. This post chronicles my second presidential house visit in 2008.

I should like Thomas Jefferson. He’s a man of grand ideals, enormous intelligence, and the most eloquent of our founding fathers.  But I don’t like him. I’m not even neutral. I actively dislike Thomas Jefferson. This was not always the case. In fact, before I visited Monticello for the first time, I liked Jefferson. I made the pilgrimage to his house as a young presidential history buff ready to soak in some new facts.

    

Perhaps the most famous presidential house, Monticello is a technical achievement, a beautiful combination of art and engineering. Its exterior illustrates Jefferson’s aesthetic discernment, while its interior displays his impressive array of talents. There is the calendar clock run by a series of weights, the letter copier, the wine dumbwaiter in the dining room, and the gardens where he experimented with new gardening techniques. Monticello is half house, half science project.

For all its unique inventions, Monticello seems oddly impersonal. Part of this stems from its popularity; the tours are forced to progress at a fast clip in order to accommodate the next tour group. However, this doesn’t account for the distinct lack of homeyness in the house. It feels like it was never a house and always a museum, built to instruct and not to welcome. That’s not a coincidence-- the foyer is dedicated to artifacts taken from the newly acquired Louisiana Purchase. Jefferson would show these items off to his guests and use them as an instructional tool.

All of this should be inspiring, but none of it excited me, because always lingering in the back of my mind was the thought that the reason he was able to accomplish so much was that he had more than 150 slaves to support his lifestyle. Jefferson argued passionately and eloquently against slavery. He truly believed it was a blight on the nation and completely immoral, yet he continued to keep slaves. He had grown accustomed to a certain lifestyle, and that lifestyle was impossible without slaves. His ideals were sacrificed to his comfort.   

So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the most compelling part of Monticello was the tour of Mulberry Row that focused on the lives of Jefferson’s slaves. The tour takes place outdoors and has a slower pace. The house is always within 200 feet; the longer I listened to stories about the men and women who labored for Jefferson’s comfort, the more the resentment and disgust built up in me. I was never a particular fan of Jefferson, but after seeing Monticello, he skyrocketed toward the top of my least favorite presidents list. In terms of his record as an executive, he’s not terrible, but as a human being, I find him incredibly disappointing.

So Monticello presents a bit of a conundrum. It’s definitely worth seeing and is a very well run historic site. The Mulberry Row Tour gives Jefferson’s slaves a voice and a well-needed presence, but Monticello itself remains as a monument to Jefferson, flaws and all. It is so serenely beautiful it is difficult to imagine how it was when Jefferson lived there—a constantly morphing construction zone. Jefferson often found new ways to improve his home, and continued to tear it down, tweak the design, and rebuild it again. The constant cycling between destruction and construction wasn’t cheap; when Jefferson died, he was deep in debt. The Monticello standing today is only one of several incarnations of the house.

The same came be said of Thomas Jefferson himself. He is one of those presidents we are told to admire because he wrote the Declaration of Independence and presided over the Louisiana Purchase. He is someone I should appreciate for his prodigious talents, astounding intelligence, and eloquence of expression. That Thomas Jefferson is carved into Mount Rushmore, but it is just one of his incarnations. The Thomas Jefferson I came to know at Monticello is all talk and no action. He could envision an agrarian utopia, and still began a dirty campaign against one of his closest friends. He would write about the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, yet he could allow his own children to live enslaved 200 feet from the extravagant mansion he bankrupted himself to build.

More than anything, Thomas Jefferson confuses me. I cannot comprehend how a man could have his mind and heart and live with his actions. He remains a riddle, one I don’t think I’ll ever solve.