The Right Way to Tell History
Virginia is for (History) Lovers. What I encountered at Monticello.
Living in a world full of conflict over how to tell history—a world no different from most periods of time but nonetheless frustrating to live through—I was refreshed to visit Monticello. There, at Thomas Jefferson’s home, they tell history as a series of facts. Their story was not agonized, patronizing, or fulminating about the past.
What I appreciate about this “here’s the facts” approach is the freedom of mind it affords visitors. The respect it implies.
Any government, university, corporation, historical site, or other organized force that tries to compel people to accept a particular narrative will be met with resistance from others who don’t hold that view. We see this play out every day in political culture wars. The solution I admire is simply to give facts—without acrimony or the desire to convince. Simply to share.
Stories are the basis of how we think about ourselves and how we develop our moral and political sense of right and wrong. It feels oppressive to have someone else tell you what to think. I want to think for myself. I both want to and automatically will fit facts into stories myself. I want to be given the facts and nothing else.
At Monticello, I received this gift.
The Beautiful, Flawed Edifice
At Monticello, Jefferson’s unique gifts and his failings are told without adjectives.
You walk through his home. Here are portraits of Jefferson’s heroes: Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton, John Locke. Here are scientific instruments Jefferson enjoyed tinkering with. Here are fossils brought back from the Lewis and Clark expedition. Here are walls and walls of books.
Jefferson’s portraits of Bacon, Newton, and Locke
Jefferson had six children with his wife. Two lived to adulthood. He also had six children with his slave, Sally Hemings. Four lived to adulthood. Over the course of his life, Jefferson owned 600 people. He was constantly in debt. He sold many books to pay debts—then promptly bought more books.
His house that he designed himself sits on back of the nickel and is a World Heritage Site. Nearby are the homes where enslaved people lived: small by modern standards but average for most poor Americans, enslaved or free, of the late 18th century.
Jefferson-designed Monticello. One of the first domed homes in America.
The inheritance Jefferson left his family ultimately fell to his grandson, who spent fifty years paying off his grandfather’s debts. To do so, this grandson sold off all the remaining slaves, forcibly separating many families in the process.
The scenery is bucolic: the Blue Ridge Mountains to the west, the flats of Virginia stretching forty miles east. It’s broiling outside.
All these facts greet you. They’re on display along with hundreds of artifacts and explanatory signs for anyone who wants to learn. They’re presented without sanctimony or flagellation. There are tours focused on Jefferson’s personal life, his relationship with John Adams, his relationship to his slaves, his gardens, and his philosophy.
The Flawed, Beautiful Mind
My views on Thomas Jefferson have long been to see him as the multifaceted person that he—like all of us—was.
I admire his love of the ideal of freedom and his outspoken defense of it. He authored the most famous phrases in the Declaration of Independence—perhaps the most consequential words in the history of human freedom—that always give me shivers:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
His Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom helped ensure religious liberty in America. His deep love of knowledge led to voracious learning, reading, and the founding of the University of Virginia. These are also the accomplishments he wanted memorialized on his tombstone down the hill from his mansion:
Jefferson’s grave
His love of ideals also led him to embrace the French Revolution even as it devolved into mob rule and the slaughter of thousands of innocent people. His belief in his ideas led him to engage in some of the worst partisan savagery in American history, lambasting President Adams as a “repulsive pedant,” a “hideous hermaphroditical character,” and lacking “the courage of a man.”
He disbanded the U.S. Navy—twice—which made the British sacking of Washington, D.C., and widespread domestic devastation possible under his successor.
He also lived well beyond his means, always in debt. The consequences of which burdened both his black and white descendants.
I don’t think it’s fair to judge people by the cultural norms of today instead of the period they lived in. Jefferson owned people in the 18th Century—as did nearly everyone else in Virginia around him. Resisting cultural norms is extremely hard.
A hundred years from now, who knows how we’ll be judged. Did you own a car? A pet? Live in a suburb? Buy imported goods? Trade stocks? Use AI? Traffic in disinformation? I expect posterity will look as unfavorably on our cultural norms as we do on those of other epochs, and probably most unfavorably on things we aren’t even thinking about today.
What’s remarkable about Jefferson, however, is that despite the prevailing cultural norms, he judged slavery as immoral:
“The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other... I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep forever.”
Jefferson even hoped that:
“The spirit of the master is abating, that of the slave rising from the dust, his condition mollifying, the way I hope preparing, under the auspices of heaven, for a total emancipation.”
But Jefferson wasn’t going to bring that liberation about himself. He would not stand up to his society. He also would’ve been broke if he tried to free his slaves.
His financial mismanagement led him to inflict suffering on people he knew he was wronging. And on his own descendants. It’s hard to admire that behavior.
He is, for me, therefore, both an inspiration and a lousy role model.
A brilliant thinker—and short on courage.
A far-sighted leader—and a short-sighted one.
Monticello made me free to feel and think all those thoughts. To judge.
To hold all those truths as self-evident.
For that space—to honestly engage with my feelings—I am grateful.
The Greatest Thing We Can do with History
The greatest thing we can do with our history is preserve it. Without preservation, all past truths perish.
I feel this frequently as a lover of Greek and Roman classic texts. For few things pain me intellectually more than coming across a passage referring to a book with a footnote that reads: “This book is lost.” or “This writer’s works are unknown.” I still remember where I was sitting when I reached the end of Tacitus’s Histories and the editor inserted in the middle of a paragraph: “The rest of this text is lost.”
The knowledge simply... gone.
The Thomas Jefferson Foundation, which runs Monticello, has worked hard to excavate and make much unfiltered history accessible.
And essential credit belongs, too, to U.S. Commodore Uriah Phillips Levy. A champion of better treatment of American sailors in the US Navy, Levy also bought Jefferson’s property in 1834 and preserved it in his family for nearly a century, so that future generations could enjoy it. Levy said:
“The homes of great men should be protected and preserved as monuments to their glory.”
To their glory and everything else we can know about them: The good, the bad, the different, the funny, the clever, the painful, the desperate, the facts. History is our essential tool for learning wisdom for tomorrow. It is told best as a series of facts. As many as we can get our hands on. Then freedom of conscience can reign.
The free citizen can judge.
