Show notes
Rebecca Burgess is joined by Frank Cogliano to discuss Thomas Jefferson, Monticello, and the Jeffersonian legacy. Brian Smith: Welcome to Liberty Law Talk. This podcast is a production of the online journal, Law & Liberty, and hosted by our staff. Please visit us at lawliberty.org, and thank you for listening. Rebecca Burgess: We know this outline from every nickel we’ve ever handled, it’s part and parcel of America’s iconography, the pillared domed home Thomas Jefferson built on his mountaintop outside Charlottesville, Virginia, and named Monticello. Jefferson called his self-designed creation his “essay in architecture,” but it is not just a thought-provoking essay in building materials and lines and perspectives, it’s an essay in American political and social thought, not to mention America’s political history. Welcome to Liberty Law Talk. My name is Rebecca Burgess. I’m a contributing editor at Law & Liberty, a senior fellow at the Yorktown Institute, and a visiting fellow with the Independent Women’s Forum. For the next 30 to 40 or so minutes, discussing Jefferson’s Monticello on the 100th anniversary of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, is Frank Cogliano, Interim Saunders Director of the Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello. Cogliano is a professor of American history at the University of Edinburgh, where he serves as the University Dean International from North America. He’s a specialist in the history of the American Revolution and the early United States and is the author or editor of nine books, including Thomas Jefferson: Reputation and Legacy and Emperor of Liberty: Thomas Jefferson’s Foreign Policy. Welcome, Professor Cogliano. Frank Cogliano: Thank you, Rebecca. I’m thrilled to be here. Rebecca Burgess: Wonderful. And I should have asked you if you’re coming from Scotland today or from Monticello, Charlottesville. Frank Cogliano: I’m coming to you from Charlottesville today, I’m pleased to say. I’m spending the current year here in Charlottesville at Monticello, directing the International Center for Jefferson Studies. Rebecca Burgess: Could you tell us just a quick little background about what the International Center for Jefferson Studies is? So many people know the building, Monticello, the home, but don’t know that there is this whole study center. Frank Cogliano: Yes, I’d be happy to. So Monticello is the home, as you say, that many people will be familiar with and hopefully they’ve visited. But Monticello is much more than the house; and it’s owned by the Thomas Jefferson Foundation and run as a museum by the foundation. But the foundation has several other arms to it, if you will, one of which is the International Center for Jefferson Studies, which is located in another historic home, about a half mile or so beyond the main entrance to Monticello at a place called Kenwood. And the International Center for Jefferson Studies will celebrate its 30th anniversary next year in 2024. And it was set up to be a center for scholarship and research and to encourage scholarship and research into Jefferson and the world that Jefferson inhabited, not just on Jefferson himself, although we do a lot of research in that area, but also on the American Revolution, the era of the American Revolution, the history of plantation slavery. As I say, the world that Jefferson inhabited and helped to shape. For 30 years, the center, through promoting scholarship, both internally within Monticello but also externally through fellowships for scholars from all over the world, promoting conferences, promoting publication, and helping new scholars publish but also senior scholars, has really helped to shape our understanding of Jefferson and his time. And in so doing, has led… I mean in the past 30 years, and I hope we’ll get to this, there’s been a real kind of efflorescence of studies about Jefferson in his time, and I think ICJS and, in particular, Monticello generally has played a part in that. Rebecca Burgess: Don’t worry, we will definitely get to the 30 years of efflorescence, as you call it. A wonderful word, wonderful image. So we’ll probably go a little bit chronologically here, but I did kind of want to for our listeners start out by just saying the Thomas Jefferson Foundation has two twin pillars of its mission: preservation and education. And I’m hoping that our conversation touches on both, but really on the education element because it has become so vital towards America’s understanding of Jefferson actually through the decades, through now a century as we are at the 100th anniversary this year. And it includes, as you mentioned, the other historic home, Kenwood. There’s a fascinating presidential history that extends beyond Jefferson through Lincoln to the Civil War, obviously, to FDR in World War II, and that’s a wonderful story as well. But if we want to start maybe at the beginning of the kind of conceptual question here, the history of presidential homes and estates, including most especially those of American Founders, often are stories that are just as rich and complex and interesting as that of their original owners, and they often reflect the larger history of the American nation. This is especially true with Monticello. Many are not aware, of course, that unlike in Europe and America, the homes of the Founders or presidents are not owned by the federal government nor fully funded by taxpayer support. They don’t necessarily have continuing grants even from the NEA, the National Endowment of the Arts, or the National Endowment of Humanities. So it’s really been up to private individuals and foundations to protect and preserve them. So Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello has a very rocky few years or decades or beyond decades after his death… His heirs had to sell his estate after his death to settle his debts with the infamous story of the public auction of enslaved individuals on the front lawn. And Monticello passes out of the hands of the Jefferson family. Can you give us just a little bit of that story of what happened after the death of Jefferson, happens before this American Jewish family, the Levy family, comes into the picture? Frank Cogliano: Sure, absolutely. And you’ve done a very good job of summing up the kind of big picture, so thank you for that, Rebecca. As you say, Jefferson died on, many people will know, on the 4th of July, 1826, the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, as did John Adams. And Jefferson died in debt. He was in pretty extreme debt for a number of reasons, which we can discuss if you like. But that debt resulted in his heirs having to sell his estate, which was Monticello, but also, as you referenced, his human capital as well, the people he enslaved. And so more than a hundred people were auctioned on the west portico. So you mentioned the nickel. It’s the nickel view of the house, the house that one sees on the nickel today and has for decades. That view on those steps, more than a hundred people were auctioned in January of 1827, and the home fell into a state of disrepair. It passed through the hands of several local people in the decade immediately after Jefferson’s death. And then, it was purchased in 1836 by a man named Uriah Levy, who was an officer in the United States Navy from New York. And Levy was unusual. He was one of the few Jewish officers in the Navy at that time, and he was a reformer. He was a sort of social reformer. He campaigned against flogging in the Navy, for example, as a punishment. And he bought Monticello because he admired Jefferson’s commitment to freedom of religion. This is where I think Levy’s own religion, the fact that he was Jewish in a majority Christian country at that time, was really important. So he bought it as a home, and really he used it as a summer home, but he also bought it and sought to preserve it as a monument and as a tribute to Jefferson’s commitment to religious liberty, which was one of the things enshrined on Jefferson’s gravestone here on the mountain top. And the Levy family owned Monticello for longer than the Jeffersons did. They owned it for almost a century, for about 90 years, throughout most of the 19th century. It’s a complicated history because Commodore Levy, Uriah Levy, as he’s called, died in 1862, and he sought to leave the house for the United States at that point. As many listeners will be aware, and undoubtedly you’re aware, there was a small matter of the Civil War going on in 1862, and Monticello was in Virginia. So, there was some debate about whether it was in the United States or not at that point. So, leaving it to the United States was a complicated question. And eventually, there was a series of lawsuits, and again, we don’t need to belabor this history, but the man who comes to own Monticello is one of Uriah Levy’s nephews, a man with the wonderful name of Jefferson Monroe Levy and Jefferson Monroe Levy owns the house basically after the Civil War down to the early 20th century, he served as a congressman at one point, but when he eventually sold it to the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, then the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation, which is the foundation established in 1923. Rebecca Burgess: If we could just maybe have a little tangent there about that whole Civil War moment and Levy trying to gift it to the United States and the United States refusing Monticello and why he wanted to offer it to the United States, to be a home for orphans of naval officers. I think this is very interesting. And, of course, just the bloody reality that the fields around Monticello, that area of Virginia, is the side of the bloodiest battlefields. Frank Cogliano: There was a lot of fighting, as you know, in central and northern Virginia during the Civil War. So you are right. Commodore Levy’s wish to create a kind of an orphanage basically at Monticello for the children of naval officers was again in fitting with his kind of reformist impulses, but it was completely impractical. And he knew that at the time, during the Civil War. That plan or that ambition or that aspiration, I should say, didn’t bear fruit. What’s interesting I think, and you made reference to this in your introductory comments a moment ago, is the fact that most presidential homes are not owned by the United States government. And although presidential libraries, which are often but not always at presidential homes, are homes run by the national archives, again, there’s often a kind of quasi-public-private dimension to this. But with the homes themselves, especially in the 19th century, the preservation of these homes was not seen as something that the government should do. And the best example in the mid-19th century, so shortly before Uriah Levy died in 1862, is Mount Vernon, and of course, Mount Vernon is bought and preserved for the nation by the organization that owns and runs it to this day as a museum, the Mount Vernon Ladies Association. The Mount Vernon Ladies Association doesn’t take any money from the federal government and runs Mount Vernon as a preserved and maintains Mount Vernon as a museum. And that was the model that emerged in the 19th century. And that’s very much the model that the founders of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation have in mind when they buy the house from Jefferson Monroe Levy in 1923. Rebecca Burgess: And there was also an unfortunate note, if I’m remembering right, of antisemitism about the Levy family owning a Monticello, which in part prompted… Or maybe not prompted their sell of it, but it made it difficult. And there were public letters and op-eds basically saying, “How could a Jewish family own this thing that is American?” Various different attempts to get either the government or some other entity to own it. Could you give us a little bit of that story? Frank Cogliano: Yeah, that’s an unfortunate part of this story. And you’re right. And of course, between approximately 1890 and the early 1920s when this foundation is created, there is a period of mass immigration to the United States, mainly from Southern and Eastern Europe. And so whereas most immigration to the United States, voluntary immigration that is, prior to that period had been from Northern and Western Europe and the British Isles, this so-called New Immigration was mainly from, as I say, Southern and Eastern Europe. And many, many millions of those immigrants were non-Protestants. Many were Catholic, but a large number of them were Jews, and they were Jewish migrants from Eastern Europe. And there was, as we know, a kind of backlash against that so-called New Immigration that culminated in a rebirth of the so-called second KKK in the 1920s. So there’s a great deal of antisemitism kind of in the air in the United States in the early 20th century, especially in the early 1920s. As you say, there was a good deal of criticism of the Levy family, despite the fact that they saved Monticello and were the caretakers of Monticello, basically saying, “They’re not really worthy of owning this iconic American site, this site that kind of represents what the United States is.” Sometimes it was explicitly said because they were Jewish. Other times it was left unsaid because frankly it didn’t need to be said. In our current vernacular, it was a dog whistle that everybody understood. And at one point, Jefferson Levy said that he would not sell the house under any circumstances because of this. He eventually acquiesced and sold it to the Thomas Jefferson Foundation in 1923. Many of whose members, I should say, original members, were themselves Jewish. And so the debate about Judaism or the association of Monticello with Judaism, it’s a deep history and it’s an important history and it’s an American history and it needs to be remembered. Rebecca Burgess: Absolutely. Once again, these historic homes of presidents and especially Monticello, is so tapestried, I would say. Maybe that’s not the right word, but it’s the best metaphor I can come up with, which is how interwoven with so many different facets of the America story, the religious liberty, the education, the political, the social, the questions about slavery and race, and the dichotomies that we have had with professing certain ideals and aspirations, and then how we have failed or succeeded in achieving some of them. And this gets to, I think, maybe Jefferson himself, of how complex of a character he is intellectually, politically, and, of course, definitely privately. He had so many public personas. He is a young Virginia land owner, colonial elite, and Virginia State delegate. Importantly, of course, I have to say this: a member of the House of Burgesses. This is how I tell people in Virginia how actually to pronounce my last name. It’s the one state where you see the light bulb click. “Oh, okay.” Rebecca Burgess: … That you see the light bulb click a bit “Ah, okay.” It’s not a hard G. Anyway, but then of course, he’s also Virginia Governor, drafter of the Declaration of Independence and Ambassador to France, US Secretary of State, Vice President, President of the United States, founder and architect of the University of Virginia, a founder of the United States. Which story is told at Monticello of this public persona, this man? And when the Thomas Jefferson Foundation was officially incorporated, how did they choose one of these personas or just the whole man and how did they go about stating what their purpose was with this foundation and what they hoped Monticello to be? Frank Cogliano: Yeah, that’s a small question. Thanks. Rebecca Burgess: You’re welcome. Frank Cogliano: And as you say, it’s a pretty full CV he’s got. He did a lot of things. I think when the foundation is originally established, Jefferson’s reputation was actually at a low point. So Jefferson’s reputation has risen and fallen over the past two centuries since his death. He is in a low point after the Civil War, down to about the ‘1930s, really the ‘…
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