Myron Magnet: What Jefferson’s fabled home reveals about the Founding Father’s mind and heart
In the summer of 1786, still mourning his beloved wife’s death four years earlier and soon to begin sleeping with her 15-year-old half-sister, his slave Sally Hemings, Thomas Jefferson fell in love with a beautiful English painter named Maria Cosway. Head over heels in love: for the 43-year-old minister to France tried to impress the twentysomething Maria by jumping a fence, and the resulting dislocated wrist troubled him the rest of his life. With his good hand, he wrote Maria a 4,500-word love letter, a half-mock philosophical “dialogue” in which his “Head” contends that he should have stuck to “intellectual pleasures” that “ride serene and sublime above the concerns of this mortal world,” while his “Heart” replies, in highly charged terms, that the happiness of love is worth the pain of loss, and that “the solid pleasure of one generous spasm of the heart” outweighs all the philosopher’s “frigid speculations.” The letter, whose stated conflict stands for an unspoken conflict over Jefferson’s love for a married woman, goes on to spin a fantasy that one day Maria will come and stay with him at Monticello, the mountaintop architectural masterpiece near Charlottesville, Virginia, that is the outward embodiment of this Enlightenment magus’s brilliant mind. And like the letter to Maria, it, too, reveals the deep conflicts between its author’s intellectual Head and the confused, darker realities that his philosophy can’t resolve.
To walk through the house is to feel oneself in a microcosm of Jefferson’s conception of the universe, a complex order whose parts mesh precisely, as one sees once one grasps the plan. With blueprint in hand I wandered from room to room, figuring out how the octagons fit together with the squares and rectangles to compose the balanced recessions and projections of the brick exterior, glowing deep red in the hot summer sunshine, beneath sparkling white pediments and dome. You can’t feel closer to the Great Watchmaker of the eighteenth-century philosophers than in the demi-octagon of Jefferson’s study, or “cabinet,” with its beautifully crafted brass models of the universe—an armillary sphere whose rings show how the stars revolve over the earth, and an orrery, a clockwork model of the solar system in which tiny planets revolve around a little brass sun. Next to them stand a brass-mounted telescope and microscope to peer into the workings of that universe, along with compasses and other instruments to map out its structure.
Jefferson built his house on a mountaintop so that he could “look down into the workhouse of nature, to see her clouds, hail, snow, rain, thunder, all fabricated at our feet! and the glorious sun, when rising as if out of a distant water, just gilding the tops of the mountains, and giving life to all nature!” Such a late-eighteenth-century taste for the sublime didn’t come cheap: Jefferson had to level the mountaintop to construct his house, and water, building materials, and supplies were costly and slow to get to the summit. But sitting in Monticello’s always cool and breezy garden pavilion and looking out over the rolling clouds and Blue Ridge Mountains below, as Jefferson liked to do, you can see why he took the trouble....