HERE LIES
THOMAS JEFFERSON
As we learned in the previous installment of “Finding the Founding Fathers” (page 429), the reason Alexander Hamilton wasn’t better known (until the musical) was because “his history had very much been written by his enemies.” One of those “enemies,” Thomas Jefferson, wasn’t going to let anyone but himself tell his story…but that’s not how it worked out.
THE PROMISE
In Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains, about 100 miles southwest of Washington, D.C., there’s a clearing near the top of a forested hill where a large oak tree once stood. In the 1760s, two college students who’d been best friends since they were children spent many an hour studying together under that tree. They cherished each other and that spot so much that they made a pact: whichever one died first, he would bury the other one under that tree. Today, that spot is known as the Monticello Graveyard.
Compared to the other Founding Fathers’ graveyards, this one has the most complicated and at times ugliest history—and it’s still unfolding today. But it’s impossible to tell the story of the graveyard without telling the story of Monticello.
NATURE BOY
Of all the words used to describe Thomas Jefferson—revolutionary, statesman, writer, architect, inventor—at heart he was a farmer. His agrarian upbringing (his father was a farmer) helped form his belief in a small federal government that gave more rights to the states and to landowners like himself. While serving as the nation’s first secretary of state, under President George Washington, Jefferson clashed with Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton, who, like the president, wanted a strong federal government. It drove a wedge between Washington and Jefferson that would never be resolved. Jefferson’s decades-long feud with John Adams, however, did get resolved late in their lives, and the two Founding Fathers famously died on the same day: July 4, 1826–50 years after the Declaration of Independence was signed.
LITTLE MOUNTAIN
Born on April 13, 1743, Jefferson was the third of ten children. After his father died, Thomas, still just a teenager, inherited the family plantation—a 1,000-acre tract of land on rolling green hills overlooking Charlottesville, Virginia—that the family had acquired in 1735. Jefferson called the estate Monticello, an Italian word that translates to “hillock” or “little mountain.”
Inspired by Italian Renaissance architect Andrea Palladio, Jefferson started designing his dream home in 1770. He hired the best builders from Charlottesville and used slaves to level the top of a hill and start construction on what would eventually become a 43-room brick mansion with a domed roof and pillared front entry. Because it wasn’t completed until 1809, the final year of Jefferson’s presidency, historians have called Monticello his “architectural autobiography.” (Having trouble picturing this “neoclassical masterpiece in the Palladian style”? Take a look at a nickel—Jefferson’s profile is on one side; Monticello is on the other.)
1970s music artists The Captain and Tennille weren’t married when their record label told the world they were (so they got married).
The 1760s and early 1770s were Jefferson’s best years, when he and his young wife, Martha Wayles Skelton, started a family. A lawyer by day—he mostly represented slaves suing for their freedom—Jefferson spent his evenings playing music in the parlor (he on violin, Martha on piano). But tragedy was never far off in colonial times, and in 1773, he returned home from a trip to learn that his best friend, Dabney Carr—the one he’d made the burial pact with—had come down with a sudden illness and died. Grief-stricken, Jefferson paid to have his friend’s body disinterred from a churchyard and buried under that oak tree. Carr became the Monticello Graveyard’s first inhabitant.
RELEASE THE PRISONER
Jefferson took over Carr’s legislative seat in the Virginia House of Burgesses, kicking off one of the most celebrated political careers in world history. Just three years later, the rising star would be chosen to pen the first draft of the Declaration of Independence, which included the revolutionary concept that “all men are created equal.” Jefferson’s checkered history as a slave owner aside, that phrase has been called “the most potent and consequential words in American history.”
Now one of the most famous people in the fledgling nation, Jefferson was elected governor of Virginia in 1779. Three years later, his beloved wife Martha, a diabetic, died at 33, a few months after bearing her sixth child in ten years. Thomas never recovered from the heartbreak and, per her request, never remarried, though it’s believed that he had a 40-year affair with a slave named Sally Hemings.
After resigning from George Washington’s cabinet over political differences (and never speaking to him again), Jefferson was later elected the third U.S. president. His first term brought about the Louisiana Purchase, which doubled the size of the United States. His second term was marred by a failed embargo of British ships that nearly tanked the American economy. In December 1807, Jefferson announced that he would not seek a third term. The day before his successor, James Madison, took office, Jefferson compared his exit from public life to being “a prisoner, released from his chains.”
DEFICIT SPENDING
After retiring to Monticello, Jefferson spent much of his time with his daughter Martha, one of only two of his and Martha’s children who made it to adulthood. As old age set in, Jefferson kept himself busy inventing things, buying books, writing letters, buying books, tending to his farms, buying books, entertaining visitors (which he grew tired of), buying books, founding and designing the University of Virginia, buying books, and then selling 6,700 of those books to the Library of Congress to get out of the huge debt he’d acquired after buying so many books. (Not to mention all the money he’d spent remodeling his house over and over, and his failed horticultural projects, including the gardens at Monticello and five other farms in Virginia.) Congress paid Jefferson $23,950 for his book collection, which came at a crucial time because British troops had burned the library’s previous collection in the War of 1812.
You can bring your horse into the Fountain Inn in South Dakota…if it’s wearing pants.
But it wasn’t enough. In 1826 Jefferson was 83 years old and $100,000 in debt—more than $2.5 million in today’s money. Slowly succumbing to rheumatoid arthritis and various urinary disorders, Jefferson woke up on July 4, 1826, and asked, “Is it the Fourth?” He died a few hours later. Martha had died 44 years earlier, and she was waiting for him in the Monticello Graveyard.
BLUEPRINTS FOR ETERNITY
The day after Jefferson died, he was given a simple funeral with few in attendance (by his own request). At 5:00 that afternoon, with rain falling, he became the family graveyard’s 13th inhabitant. But he had no grave marker. Unlike most of the other Founding Fathers, who left behind detailed instructions for their interments, Jefferson was a bit more…scattered. After he was dead and buried, his daughter was going through his bedroom and found “on the torn back of an old letter” some scribbled notes that included his epitaph, along with a crude sketch of his obelisk with little squiggles where the words should go. He began with a philosophical question:
Could the dead feel any interest in monuments or other remembrances of them, when, as Anacreon says,
Oligê de keisometha Konis,
osteôn lythentôn,
the following would be to my manes the most gratifying: on the grave a plain die or cube of three feet without any mouldings, surmounted by an obelisk of six feet height, each of a single stone; on the faces of the obelisk the following inscription, & not a word more:
Here was buried
Thomas Jefferson
Author of the Declaration of American Independence
of the Statute of Virginia for religious freedom
& Father of the University of Virginiabecause by these, as testimonials that I have lived, I wish most to be remembered. [It is] to be of the coarse stone of which my columns are made, that no one might be tempted hereafter to destroy it for the value of the materials … On the die of the obelisk might be engraved:
Born April 2, 1743 O.S.
Died ____
Nutella was invented during WWII—an Italian pastry maker mixed in hazelnuts to make a chocolate ration go farther.
It’s interesting that of the three things Jefferson wished to be remembered for, being president of the United States wasn’t one of them. Two other points about his note:
•The verse is by the ancient Greek poet Anacreon, known for his drinking songs and hymns. The full stanza translates to:
My soul to festive feelings true;
One pang of envy never knew;
And little has it learn’d to dread
The gall that Envy’s tongue can shed.
•The “O.S.” refers to the Old Style Julian calendar that was in use until Jefferson was a boy. The British added 11 days to their calendar to join the rest of Europe, which was already following the newer Gregorian calendar. So even though the birth date on Jefferson’s epitaph is April 2, his birthday is celebrated on April 13.
EVERYTHING MUST GO
Installing Jefferson’s obelisk wasn’t the family’s first priority. If his daughter and her husband couldn’t raise enough money to pay off the old man’s debts, they’d have to sell Monticello. First to go were Jefferson’s 140 slaves, who were sold at public auctions, as were most of Jefferson’s possessions and artworks (only his bust of Voltaire remained). In accordance with Jefferson’s will, Sally Hemings’s children were freed.
By 1831, with all hopes of keeping Monticello in the family dashed, whatever remained was sold off to the highest bidders. Martha and her children moved to Edgehill, her husband Thomas Randolph’s estate.
The only part of Monticello that the family didn’t have to sell was the graveyard. Jefferson was concerned that if he lost his estate before he died, he would have no place to be buried. So he left the graveyard—and only the graveyard—to the Randolphs. It took Martha seven years to raise the funds for her father’s obelisk, which was placed in the graveyard in 1833. It was made by two of Monticello’s master carpenters, John M. Perry and James Dinsmore; they tried to follow Jefferson’s instructions as best they could. But the epitaph couldn’t be carved into the coarse stone that Jefferson had asked for, so it was inscribed onto a marble plaque that was attached to the marker.
Dirtiest place in a bathroom: the floor.
As Jefferson had predicted, trespassers soon started removing chunks from the obelisk, but not for the raw materials—they wanted souvenirs. Before long, the hard edges had been rounded, prematurely aging the rock. Both Thomas and Martha Randolph were dead by 1836, and the care of the graveyard went to their son Jeff Randolph. But he didn’t spend much time tending to the cemetery, nor did the man who bought Monticello, and it fell into disrepair.
CHANGING HANDS
The man who purchased Monticello from Jefferson’s estate was James Barclay, a 24-year-old Charlottesville druggist whom Martha had referred to as a “madman.” Barclay paid $7,500 ($200,000 today) for the 500 acres that remained (out of 5,000). The Jeffersons wanted $20,000, but it was a tough sell. Not only was it located well out of town up a windy wagon road on top of a mountain, but as Smithsonian magazine described the main house, such “iconoclastic Jeffersonian details as narrow staircases and ill-defined bedrooms struck some well-heeled Virginia couples as the enemy of gracious living.”
Barclay didn’t care about preserving the history of the house or the graveyard, and he didn’t like the former president or his politics. After tearing out most of the poplar trees and gardens that Jefferson had so lovingly tended, Barclay put in a grove of mulberry trees and tried to turn Monticello into a silkworm farm. His plan failed, and he put the land up for auction in 1833, after owning it for only three years. All it would take was for one more unscrupulous buyer to erase Monticello from history.
THE COMMODORE
Luckily, Jefferson had some friends in high places, including one he’d never met, a retired U.S. Navy commodore named Uriah Phillips Levy. A century earlier, Levy’s Jewish ancestors had escaped religious persecution in the Old World and settled in the Georgia colony. Now a wealthy real estate developer, Levy credited his own prosperity to Jefferson’s struggle for religious freedom—including his rise to become the U.S. Navy’s first Jewish commodore after making a name for himself in the War of 1812.
Levy wanted to fund construction of a life-size bronze statue of Jefferson inside the U.S. Capitol. He was in France in 1833, where he visited the Marquis de Lafayette, a 75-year-old Frenchman who’d been Jefferson’s close friend and compatriot in the Revolutionary War. Lafayette agreed to donate his portrait of Jefferson to the sculptor, and asked Levy what had become of “the most beautiful house in America.” Levy said he had never been to Monticello, but that he would check on it as soon as he was able.
MONEY PIT
A year later, Uriah Levy’s bronze Jefferson statue was put on display in the U.S. Capitol rotunda, where it still is today (two floors above George Washington’s empty tomb). In 1836 Levy (whose other claim to fame was his successful campaign to end flogging as a punishment in the navy) set his sights on buying Monticello. Barclay had already sold off a lot of the land, and various disputes and lawsuits delayed the sale for another two years. When Levy finally took over ownership—for $2,700—the land was overgrown and the house was falling apart. But Levy didn’t care. “My heart leaped,” he reportedly told friends. Now considered one of America’s first historical preservationists, Levy began the arduous task of restoring Monticello. One of the first things he did was to take the plaque bearing Jefferson’s epitaph into the house before someone stole it. Trespassers were helping themselves to Jefferson’s obelisk chunk by chunk.
Nature’s lie detector: When you tell a lie, your nose gets slightly warmer.
In 1838 Colonel Jeff Randolph (Jefferson’s grandson) took possession of the plaque and put up a nine-foot-tall brick wall around the graveyard. He left a gap in the wall next to Jefferson’s obelisk so people could view it through an iron fence. After Jefferson’s daughter, Martha, died that same year, Colonel Randolph buried her in the grave next to Jefferson’s mother’s. Randolph’s wall did little to deter the vandals, though, and by the time the Civil War rolled around, Monticello Graveyard was in near ruins. Here’s a description from an 1861 article in the Charleston Mercury:
You climb, and climb, and climb…until you unexpectedly emerge in a small clearing around which a somewhat dilapidated, square brick wall runs. The iron gate is open, and as you enter, the eye glancing over a dozen or more marble slabs and head-stones rests on a granite pyramid, supported by a block of the same material, rudely hewn and blackened with age, which you know at once to be Jefferson’s tomb.
’TIL THE COWS COME HOME
Back at the house, Commodore Levy had been making progress in his restoration, but he was slowed by old age and mired in a struggle with his heirs over who would inherit the estate. In his will, Levy bequeathed Monticello to “the people of the United States for the sole purpose of establishing an agricultural school.” But while his children were fighting over who’d get the land, the Civil War broke out and the Confederate government seized control of Monticello—which was in Virginia, a Southern slave state—and put it up for sale.
Confederate colonel Benjamin Franklin Ficklin paid $80,500 in Confederate money for the property. (Prior to the war, Ficklin helped start the Pony Express, a mail service that greatly sped up transcontinental communication.) During the Civil War, he used the house as a convalescent home for wounded rebel soldiers. In the wintertime, it was used to keep cattle warm, and the upstairs bedrooms of Monticello were used to store grain. An 1864 New York Times article decried, “Shame! Shame upon our thoughtless countrymen. Why should they be so disrespectful to the sepulcher of the great patriot of the Revolution?” (After the war, Ficklin was arrested for assassinating President Abraham Lincoln—and later freed after the capture of John Wilkes Booth.)
Civil War general Robert E. Lee traveled with a pet chicken, Nellie. It laid the eggs he ate for breakfast.
The Confederacy’s defeat put the ownership of Monticello into question, and several of Levy’s heirs tried to claim it as theirs. As the legal battles dragged on, no one lived at Monticello for the next 17 years. And it showed. “The windows are broken,” Congressman Augustus Albert Hardenbergh (D-NJ) lamented to Congress after visiting the estate in 1878. “The room in which Jefferson died is darkened; all around it are the evidences of desolation and decay.” He proposed that the federal government claim ownership of the estate. But then, in 1879, another congressman, Jefferson Monroe Levy (D-NY)—Uriah’s nephew—bought out the rest of his family and took sole ownership. He paid $10,000, the equivalent of $240,000 today. And he would end up living at Monticello longer than Thomas Jefferson did.
Levy made it clear from the get-go that he had no intention of selling Monticello, and he continued his late uncle’s mission to restore it. Within a decade, the estate was looking much more like its former self. And Congress tried once again to buy it. The answer was still no. Levy was using Monticello as a summer home, and when he was home, he charged a 50¢ entrance fee to anyone who wanted to view the house. (He reportedly gave the money to Charlottesville charities.)
When Congress was unable to obtain Monticello, it set its sights on the graveyard. The plan: turn it into a national monument. Jefferson’s heirs, which now exceeded 50, weren’t interested. Nor was Levy. He owned the land surrounding the cemetery, and although he allowed visitors into Monticello, the graveyard was off limits to all but the Jeffersons.
A TIP FROM UNCLE JOHN
Are you planning to renovate your old house? You don’t have to do what Thomas Jefferson did and spend several decades and most of your fortune to do it. According to Mother Nature Network, one way to save on home renovations is to make what’s old new again. For example, instead of spending thousands on brand-new furniture, go to thrift stores and yard sales and buy beat-up old couches and chairs. Then spend a few hundred to have them refurbished and reupholstered. Another tip: If your home’s hardwood floors are scratched or faded, it’s less expensive to restore the hardwood than to replace it. And “original hardwood floors” will increase your home’s resale value.
THE OBELISK GOES SOUTH
But even though it couldn’t own Jefferson’s grave site, in 1878 Congress passed a resolution to pay for the restoration of the crumbling obelisk, along with a stronger wall to protect the graveyard. Unfortunately, the coarse stone monument was in such poor condition that it couldn’t be repaired, so Congress reallocated the funds to replace it with a brand-new monument that was built exactly to Jefferson’s specifications (right down to the “O.S.”). One difference: the replacement obelisk is nearly twice as tall.
In Bulgaria, breaking glass is considered good luck.
As for the old one, Jefferson’s heirs gave it to the University of Missouri in 1883, along with the original plaque. It’s not exactly clear why the gravestone ended up there, but it does make sense in one way, because the University of Missouri was the first college to be founded in the states that President Jefferson had acquired in the Louisiana Purchase. The obelisk and plaque were initially put on display on campus, but time was taking its toll on them, so they spent most of their 130 years at the university in a storage room. By 2013 they were so in danger of crumbling away into nothing that the Smithsonian Institution offered—at no cost to the school—to restore the headstone and plaque. The project took two years of painstaking work to complete. Today, the plaque is once again firmly attached to the obelisk, which you can find on campus in the Jefferson Garden.
EMINENT DOMAIN
In 1912 Maud Wilson Littleton, the wife of New York congressman Martin Littleton, had dinner at Monticello and was aghast to discover that the pictures on the walls were of the Levy family. “I did not get the feeling,” she later wrote, “of being in the house Thomas Jefferson built and loved and made sacred.” Littleton, or “the Lady of Monticello” as the newspapers called her, mounted a massive public campaign to wrestle Monticello away from the Levy family. It was a campaign that had, as the Washington Post described it, “a strong subtext of anti-Semitism.” Referring to Levy as “greedy and unpatriotic,” Littleton published pamphlets that accused the owners of letting Monticello “fall into ruin” (a lie that she later recanted).
Jefferson Levy countered that he was indeed caring for Thomas Jefferson’s legacy, a big part of which was honoring the rights of landowners. The three-term congressman wasn’t about to let the government take it from his family by eminent domain. At a contentious congressional hearing, Littleton testified that Uriah Levy’s will bequeathed Monticello “to the people of the United States.” She displayed photographs of the overgrown graveyard and said the Jefferson family rarely ever visited it. (The Jeffersons were firmly on the side of Levy.)
Levy’s colleague, Senator Albert Cummins of Iowa, was on Littleton’s side, and issued this threat: “When we build a railroad, if we find it necessary to take a man’s property, we can take it by condemnation proceedings. And if the government of the United States wants Monticello, it can take it.”
A joint resolution to take Monticello by eminent domain barely failed, and Levy had won round one. “When the White House is for sale,” he said, “then I will consider an offer for Monticello.” But Littleton didn’t let up. She set up “campaign headquarters” in New York City, and enlisted some big names to her cause, including President Woodrow Wilson.
Pringles flavors available outside the U.S.: blueberry hazelnut, prawn, and turkey.
As the years wore on, Levy eased up on his stance—and even considered an offer to turn Monticello into a presidential retreat, like Camp David in Maryland. Then World War I put everything on hold. By the end of the war, Levy’s fortune was dwindling, and he offered up Monticello for $500,000, half of its estimated worth. A year before his death in 1923, Levy sold Monticello to a newly formed nonprofit group, the Thomas Jefferson Foundation. Sixty years later in 1985, a ceremony was held there honoring the Levy family, without whom Monticello might not have survived the 19th century.
THE GRAVE SITE TODAY
The work that the Levys had done on the house was admirable, but it would take a lot more to restore it to its condition of 1809. Today, a century after taking over Monticello, the Thomas Jefferson Foundation reports that more than 440,000 people visit every year, quite a feat considering the historic landmark’s remote location. (George Washington’s Mount Vernon, in the suburbs of D.C., gets more than a million visitors a year.)
From the visitor center, just a short drive up a windy road out of Charlottesville, you can take a shuttle bus the rest of the way to Monticello, or you can walk (it’s half a mile). From the top of the mountain, you can look out on rolling green hills that look much as they did when Monticello was being built. A short walk from the house takes you to the base of stone steps that lead up to an iron gate with a placard that says, “This Graveyard Plot is the Private Property of Thomas Jefferson’s Descendants.”
You can’t get close enough to touch the headstone, but you can toss a nickel through the gate. On the base of the platform, directly beneath Jefferson’s epitaph, is an inscription for his daughter Martha. Also buried in the plot are Jefferson’s wife Martha, another daughter, and his son-in-law. The 0.75-acre graveyard now contains more than 225 people, and three to four more are interred there each year. They’re either related to Jefferson, or to someone with a connection to the family. (Several descendants of Jefferson’s friend Dabney Carr are buried there.) But there is one group of people who cannot be buried at Monticello, though they’re trying to change that.
THE RETURN OF SALLY HEMINGS
In 1998 the scientific journal Nature published the results of DNA tests that concluded there is a “high probability” that Thomas Jefferson was “the father of Eston Hemings, and that he was likely the father of all six of Sally Hemings’s children listed in Monticello records.” But there’s also a slight chance the father was Thomas Jefferson’s younger brother, Randolph. That’s one of the reasons the Monticello Association, a group of Jefferson’s descendants that maintains the graveyard, won’t allow any of Sally Hemings’s descendants to be buried there. The other reason is that they don’t believe Thomas Jefferson would have done something like that. In 2002 they released a statement:
The Monticello Association’s 67-5 decision not to admit the Hemings was not based on race, as some have asserted. It would have been shockingly out of character for Jefferson to have sexually exploited a 13- or 14-year-old child whom he owned and to conduct such a relationship under the eyes of his daughters and his 11 grandchildren. In his Notes on the State of Virginia, he singled out for particular criticism the sexual exploitation of slave women, which he described as “unremitting despotism” by the master and “degrading submissions” by the victim. He condemned in particular the effect of such behavior on the master’s children.
Netflix says that 61% of its subscribers regularly binge-watch TV shows.
The Monticello Association has proposed building a second cemetery at Monticello for the Hemings family. But the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, Inc., which has been in charge of the rest of the property since 1923, has accepted the results of the DNA test. After a 25-year campaign, in 2018 the Sally Hemings exhibit opened at Monticello in the room where she and her brother most likely lived. For more than a century prior to that, it was used as a bathroom.
Another group called the Thomas Jefferson Heritage Society actively disputes the DNA test results, and claims that the Monticello Society has bowed to “political correctness” by including the Hemings exhibit.
CHANGING TIMES
In February 2019, a Caucasian man named Lucian Truscott and an African American man named Shannon Lanier appeared together on CBS This Morning. Both men are direct descendants of Thomas Jefferson, the former from Jefferson’s marriage to Martha, the latter from Jefferson’s 40-year relationship with Sally Hemings. “I don’t want to be buried there,” said Lanier, “but I should have a right to be buried there.” He said he’s pleased that Truscott and some other descendants of Martha Jefferson have welcomed Sally’s family. The two sides “have been loving and knowing each other… as cousins.” But he said there’s still work to be done. “When we get to a point where… the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners can sit down at the table of brotherhood and reconciliation, and be buried together, then times have changed.” As it stands today, however, the graveyard is off-limits to them. The location of Sally’s grave is unknown, which is the case for just about all of the 600 slaves who lived at Monticello while Jefferson was alive.
The fact that the Hemings story is still making headlines is yet another indication that the Founding Fathers’ stories are still unfolding. And those stories probably won’t be over as long as the country they founded survives. At that point, the only evidence that they ever existed in the first place may be their tombstones.
No one has ever won the video game Missile Command. It’s impossible: the creator was inspired by Cold War–era “Mutually Assured Destruction.”