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 Coglian