Thomas Jefferson and Me

Our travels have taken us to the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia.  It is a gorgeous part of the country.  And today we visited Monticello, the home of Thomas Jefferson.  Our tour guide was excellent, and offered many insights into the house and the man who built it.  Well, figuratively speaking.  The actual construction, following Jefferson's instructions and architectural plan, was executed by the many hired workers and enslaved people who were owned by the third president.  And therein, of course, lies the rub.

The master of Monticello is best known for penning the stirring words in the Declaration of Independence. "We hold these truths to be self-evident," wrote Jefferson, "that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights . . . ."  All the while he owned well over six- hundred slaves over the course of his lifetime, emancipating only a few over the years, including the children of his slave mistress Sally Hemings.

That part of the Jefferson story has only been told at Monticello since the nineties.  Indeed the Hemings story, which is now highlighted on the estate, as well as in the narratives of the tour guides, was denied at Monticello until relatively recently.

To this day, of course, there are still those who would have us ignore our own history.  There are those who think we should just set aside any references to slavery (not to mention reconstruction, the Jim Crow era, and so on.)  But the sad truth racism is a very real part of our history.  America's "original sin," as various scholars have noted.  And our past is enormously complicated.  It is a mixture of the very best of human strivings and ideals, and that which is nothing short of abhorrent.  And we often find both in individuals, like Jefferson, as well as in society at large.

Our tour guide suggested that it is important that are honest in our approach to history, acknowledging the good and the bad.  And maybe, just maybe, we can learn something from it so that the mistakes of the past are not repeated.  True enough.  And today I am asking myself what can I learn from the story of Thomas Jefferson?  

(Photo:  Statue of Thomas Jefferson at Monticello.  Courtesy Linda Bradbury-Danner)