On two tours that help visitors think about the contradictions inherent in
one of our most beloved historic homes.
Like Thomas Jefferson,
the man who built and lived in it, Charlottesville’s Monticello is a hugely challenging and contradictory
place. Those contradictions exist on multiple levels: the thinker who wrote so
frequently about the dangers of an overly powerful government was also the
president whose Louisiana
Purchase was perhaps the most sweeping exercise in federal authority in
American history; the champion of the yeoman
farmer was also the speculator who ended his life so deeply in debt that
his home had to be sold off. But the most defining Jeffersonian contradictions,
and certainly the most embodied in his home, are those related to slavery: that
the man most famous as the author of the Declaration of Independence and the
line “All men are created equal” lived in a house where well more than three-quarters
of the inhabitants were enslaved African Americans (a contradiction, to be
fair, that was present
at the national level, and with which Jefferson had tried to deal in his
draft of the Declaration).
When I was a schoolkid visiting Monticello (in the 1980s), the site did a
pretty lousy job addressing that latter contradiction: to the best of my
recollection (and my parents bear this out), the tours (which were and remain
the only way to get into the house) referred to slaves only as “servants,”
among many other elisions. But of course the times they have a-changed, and to
its credit Monticello has most definitely changed with them: the site now
offers an hourly (free) Slavery
at Monticello tour, as well as numerous exhibitions,
conferences, and online articles dedicated to the subject. It’d be fair to
ask whether it might not make more sense to fold the slavery tour into the main
house tour, not least because that would force each and every visitor to engage
with those issues and contradictions (rather than opening them to the
self-selected group who choose the slavery tour). But on the other hand, the
separate slavery tour has far more time and space through which to tell those
histories and stories than would be the case if it were part of the broader
overall tour, and is thus far more able to bring to complex and vital life
those hundreds of enslaved Monticello inhabitants.
Because I visited Monticello with my two young AmericanStudiers, I was able
to experience another new tour: one that specifically
targets elementary-age kids. This wonderful tour highlighted another, less
dark contradiction to Jefferson and Monticello: that the president and
statesman was also a grandfather, one whose many grandchildren played in and
around the house throughout his years there. But our particular tour guide, Tom Nash, ended
the tour with a beautiful moment that brought home the themes of slavery as
well: having shown us many of the ways in which the Jefferson grandchildren
played in the house, Tom brought the kids on the tour close to him and took out
a small bag; in it he had replicas of the kinds of small, homemade toys that
Monticello slaves made for and passed down to their children, items that have
been found in the site’s archaeological digs.
As Tom put it, Monticello’s slaves wanted the best for their children and
families just as fully as did Jefferson; and those shared and human—if too
often tragically denied—desires are part of the histories and stories of
Monticello as well.
Final Virginia trip tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you think? Daytrips you’d recommend?
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