september 19, 1811 (thurs.)

An annular solar eclipse was visible at Monticello a couple of days ago, on Tuesday, the 17th, the annulus (the bright ring of the sun around visible behind the moon) showing from 1:53 to about half minute past 1:59 in the afternoon, by Mr. Jefferson's slightly slow clock. Of course Mr. Jefferson went out to see it and of course he observed it carefully and took meticulous notes.

march 21, 1810 (wed.)

Mr. Jefferson started planting trees in the new nursery. (Slaves are doing the actual planting, of course. Any time a plantation owner talks about doing any farm work, it means his slaves did it.) Almonds, filberts, apples, peaches, and apricots are being planted. Some of the apples are from Detroit. Michigan is already, by 1810, a source of apples.

Earlier this week other trees -- almonds, apples, cherries, pears, peaches, "plumbs" -- were set out in the orchard. Some of the peaches came from Mr. Jefferson's Italian friend, Philip Mazzei.

And it's not just about food. Monticello's Southern beauty is being enhanced by magnolias and Kentucky locusts, and rhododendrons planted around the four corners of the house.

2010: scooped

Looks like the (official) Monticello folks have the same idea I had.

This showed up yesterday on Thomas Jefferson's Monticello Facebook page and is also mentioned on Monticello's Twitter feed.

"... next week we're planning on starting a Twitter account that we can use to tweet 'as' Thomas Jefferson, writing each day about what he was doing 200 years prior (e.g. things he bought, letters he wrote, places he was visiting, etc.) ... "

It sounds like they're planning on using the same sources I do, too: The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Retirement Series, Vol. 2 (and later, 3, etc.) and Jefferson's Memorandum Books, Vol.II.

Of course, there will be differences. For one thing, they're real historians at the real Monticello and have access to every kind of documentation that survives. I'm a private individual who has been studying Thomas Jefferson for thirty-seven years, using materials available to the general public (which in his case is quite a lot), but I have no official accreditation either as a Jefferson scholar or as a historian. The tweets will be in the first person. My blog's narrator is implied to be present at the time, but is nevertheless an observer, with the limitations and flexibilities that implies. Tweets are confined to 140 characters, but blog posts can explore (and sometimes bore) in more detail.

This should be interesting.

the view from 2010: the elephant in the room

Actually, there are a couple of elephants. The biggest is slavery. Monticello was built by enslaved people. Slaves raised the cash crops and provided the labor for any money-making project, from making nails for sale to packing and shipping the boxes of books sold to the Library of Congress. The food eaten by Thomas Jefferson, his family, and anyone who visited Monticello was grown and cooked by slaves. Slaves cleaned the house and washed the clothes. The fact is that every white person (and free black person) in any of the colonies or later, states, who lived at any comfortable level of society at all did so, directly or indirectly, on the backs of slaves. Slave labor (and the products thereof) was an integral part of the whole economic system. It was the fuel -- the coal, the oil -- of the 18th and early 19th centuries.

There is no doubt that slavery was unfathomably evil. But when writing about any group of people living in an evil system it's important not to confuse the people with the system. The exploited are not merely victims; they also experience love, hope, joy, courage, and other positive aspects of the human condition. I think most current historians are getting much better at presenting enslaved people neither as completely miserable and degraded nor as being minstrel-show happy-go-lucky.

It's harder to give a fair view of the exploiting classes. For one thing, is it fair to the exploited to even try to be fair to the exploiters, to cut them any slack at all? On the other hand, in the case of institutionalized evil, this would mean condemning thousands, even millions of people -- people who are not deliberately being cruel, but for whom doing the right thing would be overwhelming, if, indeed, they're aware at all of what the right thing to do is.

One solution to this dilemma is to judge them as we judge our peers in our own time. If you're rich enough, if you're enough of a part of a technological, commercial society to be looking at a computer screen, you are an active participant in a system that elevates the comfort of some (of you) at the expense of the comfort and even the lives of other human beings. But we consider a person to be a decent citizen who lives a quiet, noncriminal life, even if that person doesn't think very often about social issues. We consider a person to be downright good who drives a fuel-efficient car, who buys some of their vegetables at the local farmer's market, who volunteers at a soup kitchen. Few of us would condemn those who haven't completely given up driving or riding in oil-fueled vehicles, who drink caffeinated beverages (all caffeine-producing plants have to be transported from the tropics, and many (most?) are grown by exploited workers), who don't open their houses to as many homeless people as will fit into the rooms.

Thomas Jefferson was not a martyr, sacrificing his life (although he did risk his life by writing the Declaration of Independence; British soldiers were sent to Monticello to bring him back to be hanged for treason), nor was he a saint, completely sacrificing his lifestyle and that of his family. He was an activist. And it is for his activism he should be respected. Unlike martyrdom or sainthood, activism does not have a state of perfect completion. It makes no sense to talk about "falling short." One can only list what has been attempted or accomplished. Nor is activism an all-or-nothing, lifetime thing. Activists rest. They even retire, and it does not subtract from what they have done.

Every piece of writing has a focus, and the focus of this blog is Thomas Jefferson, and, to a lesser extent, his family. They're the people I know the most about. But it must be remembered that also present were enslaved workers, free white workers, neighbors, and visitors.

A couple of excellent books about slavery at Monticello are:
The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family, by Annette Gordon-Reed (W. W. Norton, 2008)
and
Free Some Day: the African-American Families of Monticello, by Lucia Stanton (The Thomas Jefferson Foundation, 2000)

Or go to
Monticello: Research and Collections
and click on "Plantation and Slave Life"

One of the best books about American slavery in general is:
From Slavery to Freedom, by John Hope Franklin (Alfred A. Knopf, 1947 & subsequent editions)

A second topic, closely related to the first, is the question of Thomas Jefferson's relationship with his slave, Sally Hemings. The only thing the DNA proves is that one of her children was fathered by some descendant of Thomas Jefferson's grandfather.

In addition to Callender's spiteful, gossipy accusations, we have accounts by decent, intelligent people who were close enough to the situation to know. And somebody was lying, lied to, or mistaken, because the accounts don't match.

I personally would like to believe that Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings had a long and loving partnership. I like him, and I want him to have been happy during the last decades of his life. And from what little we know about her, I like and admire her, too.

However, there are a couple of pieces of information that indicate Thomas Jefferson's brother, Randolph. He was known for hanging around with the slaves fiddling. (Sort of the 18th-19th century equivalent of the 20th century white musicians who went to Harlem or Chicago or New Orleans to play jazz.) More interesting is the timing. Sally Hemings had her last child in 1808. She was only about 38 years old. (By contrast, Martha Jefferson Randolph had her youngest when she was 46; a quick check of my own genealogy shows most women in the days before good contraceptives to have their last child in their 40s.) Thomas Jefferson came home to Monticello to stay in early 1809. Now he would've been available all year 'round. However, Randolph Jefferson, a widower, re-married that same year, becoming unavailable. Of lesser importance as evidence, but perhaps not insignificant -- Randolph was closer to Sally's age. And she wasn't his sister-in-law.

The logical conclusion, therefore, has to be the least satisfying one: we don't know.

We do know that the Hemings family were relatives of the Jefferson family, both by marriage and later by blood. Betty Hemings was the longtime partner of Thomas Jefferson's wife's father, and Sally Hemings and some of her siblings were therefore his wife's half-siblings. (Why all the fuss about a possible love affair when the really shocking thing is the more accepted fact that he owned his in-laws?) Sally's children were either Thomas's children or his nephews and niece. Either situation would explain their position of privilege. Either situation reveals a dimension of the plantation system that was kept hidden (or at least not talked about).

jan. 21, 1810 (sun.)

It's five and a half degrees Fahrenheit outside, nineteen and a half in the greenhouse attached to Thomas Jefferson's bedroom, and thirty-three -- just one degree above freezing -- in the bedroom itself. And that's on the south side of the house. I don't even want to think about what the rooms on the north side must feel like. I reckon they're going to be keeping the tea room door closed today.

1810

In 1809, at the age of 65, after a life of serving his country since 1769, Thomas Jefferson retired to spend the rest of his life with his family at his home, Monticello, near Charlottesville, Virginia. He had been a Virginia Burgess, a delegate to the Continental Congress, Governor of Virginia, Ministre Plenipotentiaire to France for the newborn United States, Secretary of State, Vice President, and President.

Well, he sorta retired. He held no more public titles and no longer traveled to far-off places like France or Philadelphia. But he still kept up a lively correspondence with statesmen and scientists, and worked on his pet project, a modern university for the state of Virginia, where young men could be educated to be leaders of the new United States of America. Still, his life could finally revolve around his home and family. By 1810, 200 years ago, Monticello was (finally!) mostly finished, and Mr. Jefferson had traded in the role of statesman for that of Sage of Monticello and just plain Grandpapa.

This blog is a window back to that time and place. Like looking through a window, only a small part can be seen, but the view is candid and immediate.

jan. 17, 1810 (wed.)

Grandson Francis Eppes is staying at Monticello. He's the motherless son of Thomas Jefferson's younger daughter, Maria. She died six and a half years ago, when Francis was three. When Francis was five, his three-year old sister, named Maria after their mother, also died.

But he has cousins to play with here, since Aunt Martha Randolph and her children came to live at Monticello for good last year. The two eldest have their own grown-up lives -- Anne with her new husband and Jeff with his studies. Ellen, at thirteen, isn't always in the mood for children's games anymore, and James at three is a bit to young to be a true companion, and Benjamin is still a baby. But Virginia is eight, as Francis is -- they're very close and somewhat competitive -- and Cornelia just two years older and Mary just two years younger. And two of the slave housekeeper's children, Beverley and Harriet, are about the same age.

Francis is a rather sickly kid and sometimes has seizures. He likes to read children's books he and his cousins share, and he's beginning to learn the all-important skill of writing letters. Grandpapa, who loves to read and who writes a lot of letters every day, is, of course, very proud of him. Francis been writing to his papa, and his new stepmother, and his surviving grandmother, the one on his father's side. It's nice that he can write to her now, because these are the last few months he'll have with her.

A few weeks ago it was Christmas, and the kids went running through the house shouting, "Merry Christmas! A Christmas gift!" -- a thundering herd (and boy, could they be heard!) of little shoes on wooden floors, a blur of red heads (yes, even the slave kids -- their mother is very light). But now the household has begun to settle down from mad frenzy to merely bustling.