I Dropped in on Thomas Jefferson, And Now I Have Questions

Image by Colleen Conger from Pixabay

Earlier this month, I visited Monticello

My husband and I were visiting a friend in Charlottesville. Her home is about a 10-minute drive from one of the most famous historical sites in the U.S., Monticello. 

Which is, of course, the home of Founding Father, third U.S. President, primary Declaration of Independence author, and founder of the University of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson.

Who was also, during his lifetime, the enslaver of over 600 human beings.

Situated on a rise overlooking a verdant swath of Virginia’s Piedmont region, Monticello is now a World Heritage Site. It’s also the place to visit if you want a visceral sense of the inherent contradictions at the natal core of America — and of Jefferson himself.

I’d been to Monticello some 23 years before, escorting a group of 8th graders on their school-sponsored excursion from California to points of historical interest from Jamestown, VA to Gettysburg, PA, with several 14-hour days in Washington, DC as the anchor of the trip.

Monticello was a definite highlight.

What impressed me most about Monticello back then was the sheer scope and audacity of Jefferson’s vision and reach for the nation he helped found. Walking into the domed reception area and seeing the specimens sent back from the Lewis & Clark expedition — heads of Rocky Mountain sheep, beaver pelts, weapons and regalia of Plains Indians tribes — I imagined how exotic those items must have seemed at the time, like artifacts from alien worlds.

And how the possibilities of the vast continent, where the infant republic looked eagerly west, must have seemed unlimited. In Jefferson’s America, nothing was easily won, but anything was possible.

Even a nation founded not on the notion of a ruling class or the divine right of kings, but on the principle of government of the people, by the people, and for the people.

On that tour 23 years ago, slavery at Monticello was acknowledged. But politely, distantly. Obliquely.

By ‘people’, Jefferson’s Declaration didn’t mean all people

It didn’t mean Black people, that’s for sure. Jefferson foresaw that chattel slavery in the United States needed to end — at some point. He included a clause in one of the early Declaration drafts that would stop America’s participation in the trans-Atlantic slave trade, although it wouldn’t abolish slavery. 

But that clause had to be deleted to secure the signatures of some of the wealthy planters. 

So before its birth, America’s development was stunted by the need to placate its aspirational oligarchs. They wanted a government of their people, by their people, and for their people. 

Their understanding of “people” was assumed not to refer to women, indentured servants, or, really, anyone who wasn’t a white, property-owning man. It certainly didn’t include Indigenous Americans.

In the past nearly 250 years, the concept of America’s people has shifted, expanding at times and contracting at others. 

The Indian Removal Act was a crescendo in an ongoing effort to supplant, oppress, or kill off by whatever means available the original inhabitants of the North American continent.

Whatever else the law considered them, Indians weren’t granted people status then, and the Dakota Access Pipeline shows that the struggle continues today for rights over what’s supposed to be sovereign Indigenous lands.

America went to war with itself over who got included as people during the 1860s. When I was in school in the 1950s and 60s, I was taught that the Civil War was mostly about “states’ rights” — but on further examination, it turns out to have been entirely driven by the assertions of wealthy white people who regarded Black people as their personal property.

The Chinese Exclusion Act became law in 1882 and wasn’t repealed until 1943. 

For two years during World War II, American citizens who had committed no offense except having Japanese ancestry were rounded up and placed in internment camps. Their houses, farms, and businesses were confiscated and rarely returned to them — despite around 33,000 Japanese-Americans serving across all branches of the military during the war.

The 1965 Voting Rights Act sought to end practices such as literacy tests and poll taxes designed to suppress the votes of protected minorities.

In 2013, the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Shelby County vs. Holder rolled back key elements of the Voting Rights Act.

With the passage of the 19th Amendment in 1920, American women got the right to vote.

The Equal Rights Amendment, which guarantees equality of rights for all persons under the law regardless of sex, has now been ratified by the required 38 states.

But it still hasn’t been certified. I wouldn’t bet on the ERA becoming the 28th Amendment in the current administration.

Yet despite America’s serious backsliding, it has generally moved in the direction of greater equality for all.

Until January 20, 2025

If you’ve been paying any attention, you’re painfully aware that the U.S. is now led by a clown who would be king — who has actually dressed up as one and had his smirking, crowned image spewed out into the public sphere by the White House itself.

He mostly concerns himself with retribution against his perceived enemies and plays golf while his cabal of Christo-fascists, conspiracy enthusiasts, and techno-feudalists run roughshod over the Constitution. 

You don’t need me to lay out the details or the evidence. It’s right there in plain sight for anyone who wants to look.

So when my husband and I toured Monticello a few weeks ago, it was a starkly different experience from my first visit there in the early 2000s. 

In less than two months, we’d seen the foundational institutions of American democratic society decimated — just like Project 2025 promised us it would if given the chance. 

While our Social Security payments were still showing up in our bank account, we had plenty of reason to worry that wouldn’t continue. And who knew what had happened to our most personal data raided by the Visigoths of Doge?

With that sense of collective and individual threat hanging over us, standing in Monticello’s portrait room and looking at the Declaration of Independence made tears well in our eyes — and not from sentimentality.

But there was another difference in this visit. The airbrushing of slavery at Monticello, as well as at the University of Virginia — which we also toured and whose original buildings were built with enslaved labor — has been replaced by a forthright reckoning and a lot of frank educational presentations. 

The image of wealthy men with lofty ideals occupying a pyramid-top perch held up by the enforced labor of the voiceless is as inescapable as it should be.

From the vantage point of March 2025, it’s tempting to conclude that the fissures in our nation’s foundations go too deep to repair. However cherished its principles, maybe the American experiment was doomed from the start.

And yet, there are those names

There are 56 signatures on the Declaration of Independence. Some of them are familiar to every American schoolchild over age 11: Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, John Hancock, and, of course, Thomas Jefferson. Most of them are far less famous.

Some were lawyers and jurists. Some were merchants. Some, like Jefferson, were well-to-do farmers or plantation owners. They were well-educated, firmly positioned in the highest echelons of colonial society, and all of them had everything to lose.

These men pledged their reputations, their fortunes, and their lives to an untested ideal — that government’s authority should derive from the consent of the governed. Not from divine right or the simple brutality of might.

In recent years, there have been stories circulated and then partly discredited about the personal price the Declaration’s signers paid for their act. 

The point is, all of them were willing to put everything on the line for what they believed was necessary, true, and for the higher good. They signed a document that potentially rendered them traitors to the British crown, and that they knew could have proved to be their death warrants.

I left my second visit to Thomas Jefferson’s home with questions

How could someone with such brilliance, such soaring, idealistic vision, be so blind to his own behavior? His complicity in slavery, his abhorrence of mixing races, despite the six children he fathered with enslaved Sally Hemmings, nearly 30 years his junior. 

Is Thomas Jefferson the embodiment of what was best about America but also what was wrong with it from its inception?

Will America ever be able to face and integrate its shadow side?

But most of all, this: who among our federal and state elected officials will put their careers, fortunes, and if necessary, their lives on the line for their country? So many of them seem cowed, complicit, or clueless.

There is, I believe, a groundswell of citizens who, even though they don’t agree on everything, are aligned when it comes to preserving American democracy. I am among them.

We do what we can: we write, demonstrate, make calls, stay informed among the onslaught of spurious news. But it’s not enough, and we yearn for the kind of public servants willing to stake at least as much as we are on the principles of equality, fairness, and the rule of law.

We’re not looking for a flawless superhero to swoop in and save us from ourselves so we can go back to watching Netflix and scrolling Insta. 

We’re looking for people with the ability to organize us, and to make our actions count. To preserve a nation and a world worthy of passing on to our children and grandchildren.

We’re looking for leaders.

The kind of leaders who, if called to do so today, would sign that Declaration.