The Wall Street Journal-20080118-WEEKEND JOURNAL- Bookmarks
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TWILIGHT AT MONTICELLO
By Alan Pell Crawford
(Random House, 322 pages, $27.00)
There is a poignant, almost King Lear quality to Thomas Jefferson's last years. It is true that he was an honored eminence and a brilliant dilettante to the end -- his grandchildren would remember his walking through the gardens at Monticello and referring to the flora and fauna by their Latin names. But his twilight was filled with family tragedies, financial humiliation and conflicted attempts to reconcile high general ideals of government and society with the more pressing personal interests of the privileged but increasingly threatened class of aristocratic slaveowners to which he belonged. Thus Jefferson's early, eloquent denunciations of slavery (whether sincere or half- hearted) gave way to cheerleading for what he called "diffusion" -- the proposition that, if slavery were expanded into the western territories, it would somehow dilute itself and go away, never mind the cost to its victims in the meantime.
Though well-to-do by republican standards, Jefferson in his later years was chronically hard-pressed for cash, thanks to his expensive tastes and the mismanagement of his plantations. The man who had long denounced the crass commercialism of New England and who had written the pivotal assertion of the Declaration of Independence -- "all men are created equal" -- confided to one of his overseers: "I consider a [slave] woman who brings a child every two years as more profitable than the best man of the farm," because "what she produces is an addition to capital, while his labors disappear in mere consumption." Such cold calculation would have made the most hardened Hamiltonian blush.
In "Twilight at Monticello," Alan Pell Crawford treats his subject with grace and sympathetic understanding, and with keen penetration as well, showing the great man's contradictions (and hypocrisies) for what they were. And he brings alive a milieu: "Thomas Jefferson's first memory, he used to tell his family, was of being 'handed up to a servant on horseback [and] carried on a pillow.' This suggests an exalted position, which Jefferson would probably have enjoyed even if his father, often depicted by historians as a mere yeoman farmer, had not married into the highest levels of Virginia's landed gentry."
Drawing on new archival sources, Mr. Crawford reconstructs daily life at Monticello and depicts a colorful supporting cast of eminent personages, family members and retainers. Madison and Monroe were regular visitors. In 1815, Andrew Jackson, the freshly minted hero of New Orleans, stopped by en route to Washington from Tennessee. The elderly boy wonder of the American Revolution, the Marquis de Lafayette, made a sentimental visit in 1824. Thomas Jefferson Randolph, who grew up at Monticello in his grandfather's shadow, lived long enough to address the Democratic National Convention in 1872.
In the case of Sally Hemings, the mulatto slave rumored to have been Jefferson's mistress, Mr. Crawford examines everything from floor plans to fertility cycles. Sally's pregnancies, he shows, just coincided with Jefferson's visits to Monticello during his traveling years. Jefferson later added a staircase that led from the slave quarters (where Sally's room was located) directly into the library that adjoined his bedroom. Mr. Crawford cites the DNA research of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, which concluded, with "high probability," that Jefferson fathered at least one son by Hemmings and was "perhaps the father of all six of Sally Hemings's children listed in Monticello records."
The curtain fell on the sad, soap-opera elements of Jefferson's private life on July 4, 1826, and his slaves and estate were soon auctioned off by his heirs. On that same Fourth of July, the last of his co-Founders -- and a fond correspondent -- lay dying in Quincy, Mass. John Adams's last words were: "Thomas Jefferson survives." The statement was literally untrue, since Jefferson had died a few hours before. But it was true in a deeper sense, and remains true to this day.
-- Aram Bakshian Jr.
