I went to Monticello last week for the first time in over 20 years. For those who haven’t been, if you see only one 18th century mansion in America this is the one to visit. I was amazed, favorably, at how much the tour had changed.
In the early 1980s (when I was a teenager and the sun was warmer and tourists still had to stop for mastodons on the way up the little mountain) the guides still spoke of the “servants” who worked in the house and the fields. This was a euphemism that always bugged me: “servants” served but they tend to have some choice in the matter. (Some “servants” were of course just like family except you could sell them.) The guides at that time practically wore a red circle and slash with the words SALLY HEMINGS QUESTIONS in the middle, and when I asked (I was about 16 or so, so that was fascinating to me) was told point blank by the aged docent “That’s based on the work of a historian named Fawn Brodie and she was a liar.” (Point of fact: Fawn Brodie wasn’t by a far stretch the most reliable of biographers or historians, particularly in that book, but her documentation of Jefferson’s whereabouts 9 months before the birth of each of Sally’s children was dead-on.)
I also asked, because I’d heard it on the (admittedly I know now notoriously unreliable) Rest of the Story, that Monticello was abandoned and used as a hay barn. This I was also told was an exaggeration- never happened.
The tour of the grounds of Monticello made mention of the cooks and blacksmiths and the lot, though the word “slave” was seldom if ever used and it was just assumed that they all pitched a sleeping bag in the beautiful big house at the end of their shift and mad Shmorrs and sang Kum Bah Yah until the next morning.
I was really surprised how much things have changed. There is now a tour of “Mulberry Row”, a slave work and residential area, that is as long as the tour of the house. While none of the slave quarters remain other than those that are located under or attached to the main house, you’re shown the ruins and foundations where they stood. You learn so much about the lives of Monticello slaves that if flavors your opinion of Jefferson before you ever set foot in the place (e.g.- one of the remaining cabin sites was of a 20.5" by 12" cabin that housed seven people [admittedly, frontier families didn’t have much more commodious accomodations, but at least the fields they worked in were their own], or that while Jefferson was not a harsh master himself he did knowingly retain an overseer who used the whip, or that field slaves worked 16 hour days in the field and then came home to take care of their families, or Jefferson’s comments on slaves most valuable to him [“those who give birth every two years and have skills in the kitchen and with the crops”] that show he wasn’t as “victimized” by the institution as he sometimes seemed to indicate).
They even discuss Sally Hemings, stating that best evidence (oral, DNA and historical) is that Jefferson was indeed the father at very least of her son Eston and probably of more if not all of her children. The house docent (who was black, also a nice change) respectfully asks that you not ask questions about Sally inside the house because of the “little ears” of the children in attendance but instructs you where to do so and will answer them herself in the yard after the tour.
It’s almost unfortunate that the house is so beautiful and Jefferson such a brilliant man that I felt guilty when the knowledge of the slave populations didn’t flavor my opinion of the tour as much as it should have. Ultimately he was a very flawed and hypocritical man, but a very flawed and hypocritical man who was also one of the greatest and probably the single most brilliant statesmen (Franklin and Hamilton his only near rivals in my estimation) of all early American statesmen and compares favorably to most who came afterwards.
It’s amazing, incidentally, how even after the DNA and circumstantial evidence combine to all but give Jefferson a cigar as Daddy the dissenters remain adamantly opposed to Jefferson’s paternity of the Sally Hemings branch. They’ve gone to lengths and expense to dispute the claims made and published their results in books sold at the Monticello gift shop (citing one of Jefferson’s paternal nephews as the father). Strange.
Anyway, mundane and pointless but I had to share it.
My favorite comment I heard in Monticello: the guide was displaying Jefferson’s library (or the reproduction of same) and discussing his “donation” of it to the rebuilding of the Library of Congress (the only whitewashing of him on the tour- in fact he didn’t donate but sold his library for fair market value because he was desperate for cash). Know-it-all-tourist: “Man that was a generous gifts, cause books was so expensive in those days… they were all still handwritten and some could take years!”
Another (after seeing the dumbwaiter that brought wine from the basement to the side of the fireplace in the dining room): “How did he keep the glasses from falling over on the trip up?”