My trip to Monticello last week gave me a fresh perspective on our Independence Day. During the three-hour drive from North Carolina, my daughter and I listened to portions of Jon Meacham’s biography of Thomas Jefferson as a pretext for our visit. We were surprised by what we didn’t know about this man who lived atop the little mountain. Renowned presidents from George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, to Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt were eminent men and transformative presidents, but only Thomas Jefferson was a renaissance president whose impact ranged across so many aspects of our lives and over so long a period. Consumed by the quest for knowledge, Jefferson was a man of the Enlightenment, always looking forward, never tiring of invention and inquiry, designing gadgets, such as contraptions to open doors at Monticello.
Jefferson’s home was a work-in-progress for the better part of four decades, inspired by the architecture and interior designs he saw during his assignments to France. The front foyer, with its collection of relics from Lewis and Clark’s Expedition, resembles the Smithsonian Museum more than a president’s personal residence. The bedroom matched the man with its alcove bed that opened to a dressing room on one side and to his office on the other, convenient for his late-night inspirations for writing. His library was my favorite room, with its extensive collection of antique books and a copy of the Declaration of Independence. It once held over six thousand books, but overwhelming debts in his retirement forced him to sell them to the government, which became the Library of Congress we know today.
Despite everything he had to offer, Jefferson shied away from public attention. He was a man of letters, not speeches. This cool-headed and taciturn American Sphinx gave just two public speeches during his two-term presidency, and felt far more comfortable writing, to which the Declaration of Independence attests. And he never felt more comfortable than in the seclusion of Monticello.
The author of the words “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal,” has not had an easy time of it in recent years. He was the slave owner who John Adams persuaded to draft the Declaration of Independence, an emblem of liberty not only for white men but for blacks. At the time, Jefferson and other southern Democratic-Republicans were mostly slaveholders, and formed their political view upon “their supposed superior devotion to the personal rights of property,” while it was the party of the North, the Federalists, that was mainly devoted to the rights of people. In the past thirty years, DNA evidence and subsequent scholarly reevaluation established the high likelihood that he had several children by his enslaved mistress, Sally Hemings. And he was the only prominent founding father who did not free his enslaved workers after his death.
The truth in Jefferson’s case is complex. Some Americans idolize him, others echo the words of an anonymous 18th century writer who wrote to him, “You are the damndest fool that God put life into.”
In the spring of 1859, Abraham Lincoln wrote in a thinly disguised critique of the human failings of Jefferson, “he who would be no slave, must consent to have no slave.” But Lincoln’s letter has a larger political and philosophical purpose than pointing out Jefferson’s moral hypocrisy. Lincoln wrote:
“All honor to Jefferson — to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there, that today, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling block to the very harbingers of reappearing tyranny and oppression.”
Lincoln, who considered Jefferson his nonpareil, worried whether nations, like parties, could also abandon formerly sacred principles for personal exigency. “It is now no child’s play to save the principles of Jefferson from total overthrow in this nation,” Lincoln warned, just two years before Fort Sumter. “The principles of Jefferson are the definitions and axioms of a free society” — as self-evident, he believed, as “the simpler propositions of Euclid.” His words are just as relevant today.
So, what would Jefferson have said about why we celebrate the Fourth of July?
In the summer of 1826, Jefferson drafted a letter to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. “All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man,” he wrote. “The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their back, not a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God. These are grounds of hope for others. For ourselves, let the annual return of this day forever refresh our recollections of these rights, and an undiminished devotion to them.”
In June 1826, he struggled to hang onto to life. His daughter sat with him during the day, and his personal secretary, Nicholas Trist, kept watch at night. Lying in his alcove bed at Monticello, he reminisced about the Revolution, recounting stores as if willing himself to live to see the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. In his remaining three hours, he woke several times and repeatedly asked, “This is the Fourth?” At last, the clock chimed midnight, ushering in the Fourth of July. Upon hearing that, Jefferson lied back and nodded. “Ah,” he said, “Just as I wished.” And in a poetic coincidence of history six hundred miles away, his old rival and friend, John Adams, also died on that fateful day.