The Jefferson contradiction
For those of us trying to make sense of American history, the “little mountain” home of Thomas Jefferson is a good place to start.
A four-hour-plus car drive from home, Monticello contains the vast contradictions of Jefferson the man and the nation he helped lead to independence. Not for nothing is Jefferson recalled as the author of the five most liberating and important words in all of American and maybe world history — “all men are created equal” — and as a slave owner.
Because this year’s July 4th calls for illumination, I thought it might be worthwhile to visit Monticello. I was intrigued by the new Sally Hemings exhibit — Hemings was Jefferson’s enslaved mistress, the mother of four of his children.
I guess I was also looking for answers to the longest continuing conundrum of American history: how could a nation founded on human freedom and individual liberty ensnare millions in the iron vice of slavery?
Alas, Monticello doesn’t provide an answer to this question that has haunted us now for over two hundred years — the legacy of slavery is alive and well, as palpable as today’s news.
It does, however, in its treatment of Sally Hemings, point the way to an understanding of the blighted experience of black Americans alongside the more triumphant experience of white Americans, and a rough means of reconciling the two.
Now, it might seem that reconciliation, if that’s the word for it, is impossible, especially now, in a moment of absolutes when everyone has grievances they feel the need to air.
The folks who operate Monticello — known collectively as the Thomas Jefferson Foundation — have their own mountain to climb: at the summit stands Jefferson, the Enlightment’s golden boy who in his early 30s launched the nation and world on “the boisterous sea” of democratic governance.
Jefferson also stands at the bottom of the mountain, marooned in a dank, underground pit, a place of moral corruption. During his lifetime, Jefferson owned some 600 slaves. At any one time at Monticello, there were about 150 in residence; slaves labored from dawn to dusk on the plantation outside of Charlottesville.
Jefferson could have been the most benevolent man alive, but as the Foundation says on its Monticello website: it was “impossible to be a good slave owner.”
The Foundation’s nearly impossible task is this: it’s asking the public to embrace the whole Jefferson, the good and the bad. Americans throughout history have resisted the notion of a gray middle ground. We like our public personages to be one thing or another: bad boys and brutes or knights in shinning armor.
It must be said that Monticello tilts toward the latter, and with good reason. The short film that introduces Jefferson to visitors explains the “glaring contradiction” in the domestic makeup of Jefferson’s world: slavery. It names Jefferson as the father of Sally Hemings’ children, despite some smattering dissents based on the probabilities of DNA.
The film concludes on the high notes of the Declaration of Independence, and its meaning and import in a world, first of kings and royal courts, and later, in a world order conspicuous for both colonial and authoritarian rule.
It concludes with depictions of revolts against tyranny, beginning with the Haitian slave revolt of the 1700s through the fall of the Berlin Wall and communism. Visitors also see Ghandi in India and hear Martin Luther King Jr. on the National Mall in 1963.
Each of these revolutions originated in the American Revolution, and more particularly in the words of Jefferson, the film argues. Without the moral authority of “all men are created equal” the world would be a far sadder and crueler place, certainly less free.
But the film does not represent the totality of what Monticello has to say about slavery. Two weeks ago a Sally Hemings exhibit opened in a small room about 75 feet from Jefferson’s principal architectural gem. The South Pavilion contained the Monticello kitchen and smokehouse along with one or two slave quarters. It is believed that Sally lived here.
Projected on a white screen in the exhibit room are the words of one of her three sons, who spoke to an Ohio newspaper in 1873 about family life in slavery under Jefferson at Monticello. Strikingly, he uses the words “our parents” in reference to Sally and Thomas.
Song birds and bright flowers gather electronically on Sally’s blouse as her son’s words appear on screen. There are no photos of Sally, so we don’t know what she looked like. She died in 1835. Her final resting place is unknown.
Jefferson is buried beneath a tall obelisk in the family cemetery on the Monticello grounds.
Sally was three years old in 1776, when Jefferson wrote the words that lit the world on fire.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown and is the author of two books — Grand Salute: Stories of the World War II Generation and Our People. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.