Jefferson’s involvement with the creation of Monticello, and also of his private retreat at Poplar Forest, are both marked by his insatiable thirst for knowledge and experiment. It is not news that he often operated well beyond his means, but managed somehow to stay afloat. At one point, he sold his considerable library to Congress to cover his debts.
Ms. Wulf gives us a magnificent chapter on the Lewis and Clark Expedition, undertaken in 1804 after the Louisiana Purchase, at Jefferson’s behest. Meriwether Lewis was Jefferson’s secretary, and to him, Jefferson entrusted the adventure of mapping and exploring America’s new territory. Lewis had good observational knowledge of his natural surroundings, but to be sure he would set out with proper training, Jefferson sent him to be tutored by leading naturalists and scientists so that he could learn the arts of mapmaking, surveying, anatomy, fossil-hunting, mathematics and botany. Even Benjamin Rush, a doctor of some renown from Philadelphia, got into the act, providing a stash of his famous pills (laxatives) that were supposed to cure any illness.
Lewis had to learn, too, how to collect and dry and mount and label plant specimens, and how to preserve seeds. The intricacies of such pre-journey preparation are rarely examined in school textbooks: one reads instead abbreviated accounts that highlight a few scary moments and note not much beyond the fact that Lewis and Clark set out, had adventures, and came back. Would that Ms. Wulf could share what she knows with bored high school students of American history!
Madison, true to the image of him that has come down to us, was a careful and imaginative owner of Montpellier, the plantation he inherited from his father. He possessed a "passion for agricultural innovation and education [that] was well known, and within four weeks of his return from Washington (after his terms of office), he [was] unanimously elected as the first president of the newly founded Agricultural Society of Albemarle." This society had been started by Virginia farmers who aimed to improve “agricultural practices” and the repair the depleted soil of Virginia. Members of the organization "answered questionnaires about crop rotation, average yields of fields, how much land they had cleared, the proportion of 'worn out land' on their farms, how much and what type of manure (if any) they applied to their fields, and so on."
In his capacity as president of this organization, Madison gave a speech that, according to Ms. Wulf, … "would place him at the vanguard of forest and soil conservation decades before a concerted effort was made to preserve America’s nature." The speech was attended by just a small number of farmers, but its contents were reported in several newspapers, and pamphlets were printed. The vision and depth of Madison’s words are staggering to this day, involving as they do the interconnectedness of living things and the imperative that mankind must respect nature. He ended his speech with a plea that we stop destroying our forests, which cleanse the air we breathe.
What is amazing to the modern mind is the fact that the privileged and conflicted lives of Virginia's elite managed to produce so much progress toward democracy despite the contradiction between their beliefs in the equality of human beings versus their status as slave owners. Even though he is honored for writing that "all men are created equal," Jefferson owned a large number of slaves, and although he had been passionately anti-slavery as a young man, he failed in his promise to free his slaves after his death. No doubt he realized that his estates could not be maintained without them. In the light of modern DNA evidence, however, we can see why alone amongst the others, he freed many of the Hemmings family, Sally Hemmings having been his longtime mistress, who is now believed to have borne him children.
George Washington alone, among the founding fathers who owned slaves, directed that his slaves should be freed after his death, but even then, this was not to happen until his wife had also died.
Much has been written about the close friendship between Jefferson and John Adams, who were both prime movers in the creation of the United States. While Adams was in England negotiating the peace treaty that ended the War of Revolution, he invited Jefferson, who was on his diplomatic mission to France, to visit. There ensued a period or great amity between the Adams family (John, his wife, Abigail, and their eldest daughter, Nabby), and Jefferson.
At Adam’s suggestion, Jefferson undertook an extended tour of British farms and gardens, starting with Wooburn Farm, which had been designed in the 1730’s. There had been much gardening information and material (seeds, plants) shared with American growers, who not only ordered plants and seeds from Old England, but also sent seeds and plants from America which were much prized for English gardens. The Wooburn landscape was a real departure from the more traditional, formal gardens of England. There were paths and groves and shrubs that enclosed farm fields and meadows. The whole was a harmonious mix of "the aesthetic and the practical" that greatly influenced Jefferson’s plans for his American estates at Monticello and later at Poplar Forest.
Unfortunately, American politics interfered with the friendship between Adams and Jefferson. Jefferson was decidedly a Republican (the forerunner of our Democratic Party). He greatly favored France, and admired the aims of its Revolution while deploring the excesses. The Federalists and Alexander Hamilton, on the other hand, favored England and its monarchical government. They were also in favor of business and urban development, not of an agrarian society.
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