December 2024

 

Saving Monticello: The Newsletter

The latest about the book, author events, and more

Newsletter Editor - Marc Leepson

 

Volume XXI, Number 12                                                       December 2024

 

 

JANE KAMENSKY: THE INTERVIEW: In October last year, nearly 100 years after its founding, the Thomas Jefferson Foundation announced the appointment of Dr. Jane Komensky, Ph.D., as its new president and CEO.

Dr. Kamensky, who officially took over on January 15 this year, is just the second historian to head the Foundation. The late Dr. Daniel P. Jordan, Ph.D., who served as the Foundation’s director from 1985 until his retirement in 2008 was the first. Dan Jordan came to the Mountaintop from Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond where he chaired the History Department.

Dr. Kamensky took the job at Monticello after a thirty-year academic career, most recently at Harvard University where she was a Professor of American History and the Foundation Director of the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America at Harvard Radcliffe Institute.

She has written or co-written seven books of American history, including A Revolution in Color, the award-winning biography of the colonial artist John Singleton Copley, and co-edited The Oxford Handbook of the American Revolution.

I recently spoke to Dr. Kamensky about her first year as head of the Foundation and her perspective on the Levy Family’s role in saving Monticello. What follows is our conversation, edited for length.

What did you know about the post Jefferson history of Monticello before you took the job?

I can admit to considerable ignorance about the post-Jefferson, pre-Foundation history of Monticello before we came here. After the recruitment started, I was informed about the documentary [“The Levys of Monticello”], which was the way I first learned about the remarkable history of the Levy Family preserving this treasure for the nation.

Can you explain how the post-Jefferson history of Monticello—specifically the Levy Family’s ownership—informs your work as the head of the Foundation?

We always need to be telling the story of what the investment is across generations that allows a fragile thing to continue to exist.

I have a friend in the museum world who says the first thing we should be prompting anybody to ask when they’re looking at a historic object in a museum or visiting an historic site is: “How is it that this is still here?”

That’s because, ultimately, that is the question that activates the visitor or the viewer. To ask that question is to enter that work of preservation and transmission—to enter the work of making a building and a landscape like Monticello a kind of living text.

A place that does that really successfully in its interpretation is the Museum of the American Revolution [in Philadelphia], whose “wow” object is Washington’s war headquarters, which is a tent. They do a wonderful orientation program with his field Oval Office—this fragile canvas tent. The sort of meta story—the story that really hits the viewer in the gut—is that the work of preserving the tent is like the work of preserving and renewing democracy.

And there’s a parallel with the Levys?

The Levys have done a more herculean thing by preserving an immense, fragile, and demanding site by not tearing it down and re-making it in their own image, by making a building live values that were vitally important to Commodore Levy’s ascent through prejudice in the United States.

So, by telling that story, we are inviting our guests—as you have invited readers of the book and the documentarians have invited viewers of the movie—into the work of preserving this fragile fabric of self-government.

How would you characterize what Uriah and Jefferson Levy did at Monticello during the 89 years they owned it?

We have to remember that the common condition for all human history—and it’s written in artifactual records—is loss and destruction. The default is not preservation; the default is loss. Entropy alone—forget about Jefferson’s debt and the inability of his heirs to reasonably sustain the plantation and house—entropy alone would have destroyed the thing long since.

And it’s remarkable [that the Levys stepped] into that role as preservationists and not wildly re-made the place in their own image. I think that in the preservation community it’s a relatively modern sensibility that says we should start by doing no harm. And I think the Levys brought that approach to Monticello.

I’m thinking of a counter example: the former townhouse, now the Old State House in Boston [above], which was nearly destroyed fifty times over. One of the first big gestures those who saved it accomplished was to tear out its guts and put in a grand Victorian staircase. You can certainly imagine a Victorian sensibility, wanting to do that at Monticello in an extremely inconvenient house in a whole set of ways.

But [the Levys' allegiance to Jeffersonian ideals was such that they lived as lightly in the thing as they could. It's truly remarkable.

So, it’s not only the stepping in to save it, but then the living with, and in, it in a way that didn’t radically remake it in their own image.

I wrote in Saving Monticello that you can make a case that Uriah Levy was the first American house preservationist. Do you think that’s true?

I think he was early by a generation. [It wasn’t until] around the time of the U.S. Centennial in 1876 when the first major American museums were founded with period rooms as centerpieces when a kind of preservationist ethic around the colonial period—even though it was often wrong; they often put things together that wouldn’t have gone together—begins to have some public traction.

So, Uriah Levy is early by a long generation from that at a time when the spirit was toward the new. I’m not enough of an architectural historian to say, yes, you’re right, theirs is the first such example, but he’s certainly swimming against the tide in the second and third quarter of the nineteenth century.

Anything else about that Levys and Monticello that you’d like to add?

I’m eager to embrace the spirit of pluralism that brought the Levys to save Monticello. I think we need it badly in America in 2024. I think Jefferson knew how valuable it was during his lifetime.

And the last thing I’ll offer, sort of invoking your book title, is we all need to do the equivalent of saving Monticello every day. [I’m] thinking about ourselves as preservationists, not only of houses and landscapes, but also of our form of self-government, that allowed Uriah Levy and his descendants to have the trajectory that they did.

 

THE HARLEY LEWIS PAPERS: Richard Lewis, a great grandnephew of Jefferson Levy, recently emailed to say that the family has donated the papers that his mother, Harley Lewis, had gathered over many years dealing with her great uncle Jefferson Levy and other family Monticello matters to the American Jewish Historical Society in New York City.

His mother, Richard Lewis told me, “was the keeper of family papers handed down to her from her mother, Frances Wolff Levy. When Harley died in 2020 at the age of 94, we decided to donate all of the papers to the American Jewish Historical Society in 2024 where they have now been archived and added to their collections to preserve them for future generations.”

As the JHS description of the material notes: Harley Lewis (above)—who graciously shared the material with me when I was doing the research for Saving Monticello 25 years ago—“served as the family’s historian and primary connection to Monticello in the mid- to late-20th century, the home of … Thomas Jefferson, and the legacy of Commodore Levy, the first Jewish person to rise to the top of the U.S. Navy and owner of Jefferson’s Monticello purchased in 1834,  and held by the family until it was sold to the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation in 1923 by Uriah’s nephew, Congressman Jefferson Monroe Levy (1852-1924).

“The collection contains correspondence, articles, and news clippings relating to Commodore Levy, and family correspondence, genealogy, photographs, articles, memorabilia, indentures, wills and last testaments, and some ephemera regarding families related to Uriah Levy in Virginia and New York City.” The book had a strong start. Not long after The Unlikely War Hero arrived in bookstores and at online booksellers early this month, it became the bestselling Vietnam War History book on Amazon.com And the first printing sold out within a week.  

EVENTS:  I will be doing more events in 2025, including talks on Saving Monticello, as well as for my new book, The Unlikely War Hero. It’s a slice-of-life biography of the extraordinary Vietnam War story of Doug Hegdahl, the youngest and lowest ranking American prisoner held in Hanoi during the war. More info at https://bit.ly/Hegdahl

If you’d like to arrange a talk on that book, or on Saving Monticello or any of my other books, please email me at marcleepson@gmail.com  

For details on upcoming events, check the Events page on my website: marcleepson.com/events 

COMMERCE: I have brand-new paperback copies of Saving Monticello and a few as-new hardcovers. To order personalized, autographed copies, go to https://bit.ly/BookOrdering or email me directly at marcleepson@gmail.com 

I also have copies of five of my other books: Flag: An American Biography; Desperate Engagement; What So Proudly We Hailed; Ballad of the Green Beret, and Huntland.

Due to high demand, I’m temporarily out of copies of The Unlikely War Hero but will be restocking very soon.

November 2024

 

Volume XXI, Number 11                                                       November 2024

 

 

BOUNTEOUS HOSPITALITY:  By the early 1890s, as I wrote in Saving Monticello, Jefferson Monroe Levy, a self-made millionaire real estate and stock speculator, was enjoying a lavish lifestyle. The owner of Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello since 1879, he also had an opulent townhouse in New York City, owned a good number of commercial properties in Manhattan and in and around Charlottesville, and regularly traveled to England, France, and Italy. I’ve likened the life-long bachelor to being a late 19th century equivalent of a mid-twentieth century jetsetter, as he regularly hobnobbed on the Continent with royalty and others in his exalted income bracket.

Between his globetrotting, J. M. Levy spent many summer weekends and most Thanksgivings at Monticello, oftentimes in the company of members of his family. A staff of domestic servants catered to their needs on the mountaintop. Some worked year-round at Monticello; others were Levy’s New York employees, including his valet, butler, and laundress. His sister Amelia Mayhoff took over as Jefferson Levy’s Monticello co-host following their mother’s death in January 1893.

During the 40-plus years Jefferson Levy (below) owned Monticello, he also hosted countless out-of-town visitors Many of them were nationally prominent political figures, mostly Democratic Party higher-ups. The long list included members of Congress, governors and two sitting presidents—Grover Cleveland and Theodore Roosevelt.

A fiscally conservative Democrat, Jefferson Levy began taking an active interest in politics in the last decade of the 19^th century. He had become an influential voice in the Virginia Democratic Party and made strong connections with party leaders in New York. That networking culminated in him being the Democrats’ nominee to represent New York City’s thirteenth congressional district in a special election in 1899, which he won. Levy served for two years in the House, and did not choose to run for re-election in 1900. But ten years later, he re-launched his political career and served two more terms in Congress, from 1911-15, before deciding not to run again in 1914, after the U.S. entered World War I.

One reason Levy bowed out of politics in 1914 was his pending decision—which he announced that October—to sell Monticello after two years of fending off a campaign in Congress that  would have the government take over Monticello and turn it into a house museum.   

***************

Flash back to the summer of 1894 and a visit to the mountaintop that likely influenced Jefferson Levy to run for Congress five years later—a visit that I only recently learned about and is not mentioned in Saving Monticello. In August of that year, the Cleveland Administration’s Vice President, Adlai Ewing Stevenson, spent a few days on the mountaintop, along with David Bennett Hill (1843-1910, in photo below), a powerful Democratic Senator from New York

A prominent lawyer in Elmira, N.Y., Hill had steadily made his way up the ranks of the Empire State’s Democratic Party. He was elected to the State Assembly in 1870, where he became a close associate of Democratic Governor Samuel J. Tilden, who later became the Democratic nominee against Rutherford B. Hayes in the infamous disputed presidential election of 1876.

Hill was elected mayor of Elmira in 1882. Later that year, he ran for Lieutenant Governor and won, getting more votes than the Governor, Grover Cleveland. When Cleveland was elected to the presidency two years later, Hill filled out the rest of Cleveland’s gubernatorial term.

David Hill won the 1890 election to the U.S. Senate while he still was New York’s Governor, but chose to stay in that office for more than a year, not taking his seat in the U.S. Senate until January of 1892.

Vice President Stevenson (1835-1914)—the grandfather of Adlai Ewing Stevenson II, the governor of Illinois and the Democratic presidential nominee in 1952 and 1956—also was a national Democratic Party bigwig.

An Illinois congressman in the 1870s and 80s, he went on to serve as Assistant Postmaster General (a politically powerful job in those days) during the first Cleveland Administration after which the party chose Stevenson to be Grover Cleveland’s running mate in 1892.

It's very likely that the visit to Monticello by those two Democratic Party heavy hitters in 1894 played a role in Jefferson Levy’s decision five years later to jump into national politics and run for Congress. At the very least, Hill and Stevenson definitely were impressed by the fact that Levy owned Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello and that he was among the wealthiest men in the country—and someone who had the wherewithal to entertain guests lavishly.

After returning to Washington, Hill told an Alexandria (Va.) Gazette reporter that the trip to Monticello “was a delightful one” and that Levy’s hospitality “is not only bounteous but magnificent and that he entertains elegantly.”

During the last night of their short stay, Hill told the reporter that “a large number of the people of Charlottesville and vicinage [very likely Democratic Party supporters] rode out to the Monticello to call” on him and Stevenson and that both of them “addressed” the group.

The only fly in the ointment, the newspaper said, was that Hill said he “didn’t sleep well” upstairs in the small, octagonal guest bedroom known as “Mr. Madison’s Room,” in honor of the fact that James and Dolly Madison often spent the night there in days gone by.

EVENTS:  On Thursday, November 14, I’ll be doing a talk on the life of the Marquis de Lafayette, based on my 2011 concise biography, Lafayette: Idealist General, in a fund-raising event for the Virginia Piedmont Heritage Area, a nonprofit historic preservation organization, in Upperville, Va. To register, go to https://bit.ly/VPHALafayetteTalk

On Tuesday, November 19, I’ll be joining Susan Stein, Monticello’s Senior Curator for Special Projects, at the Metropolitan Club in Washington, D.C., for a showing of Steven Pressman’s great documentary, “The Levys of Monticello,” followed by a discussion of the film, which was inspired by Saving Monticello.  

I will be doing more events in December and in 2025, including talks on Saving Monticello. I also will be doing talks and media interviews starting in early December for my new book, The Unlikely War Hero. It’s a slice-of-life biography of the extraordinary Vietnam War story of Doug Hegdahl, the youngest and lowest ranking American prisoner held in Hanoi during the war. More info at https://bit.ly/Hegdahl 

If you’d like to arrange a talk on that book, on Saving Monticello, or any of my other books, feel free to email me at marcleepson@gmail.com  For details on upcoming events, check the Events page on my website: marcleepson.com/events

COMMERCE: I have brand-new paperback copies of Saving Monticello and a few as-new hardcovers. To order personalized, autographed copies, go to https://bit.ly/BookOrdering or email me directly at marcleepson@gmail.com 

I also have a stack of six of my other books: Flag: An American Biography; Desperate Engagement; What So Proudly We Hailed; and Ballad of the Green Beret, and Huntland.

October 2024

 

 

Saving Monticello: The Newsletter

The latest about the book, author events, and more

Newsletter Editor - Marc Leepson

Volume XXI, Number 10                          October 2024

A SUMMER RESORT: The story of how Jefferson Monroe Levy gained control of Monticello in 1879 after more than two decades of legal wrangling among himself and his Uncle Uriah Levy’s other heirs is a long and winding one. And one with a surprising conclusion.

It began shortly after Uriah Levy’s death on March 22, 1862, when his heirs—more than 60 of them—discovered that the Commodore unexpectedly bequeathed Monticello to the people of the United States to be used as an agricultural school for the orphans of Navy warrant officers. 

That didn’t happen because Congress, which would have had to approve the idea, had little time to deal with a real estate matter during the darkest days of the Civil War. 

The will stipulated that if Congress did not green light that plan, Monticello should go to the state of Virginia for the same purpose. Virginia, by then no longer in the Union, took no action—even though the South had confiscated Monticello in 1861 since it was owned by a northerner. 

The will had a third contingency; if Virginia said no, then Jefferson’s Charlottesville property would go to the Portuguese Hebrew congregations of New York, Philadelphia, and Richmond to be used as an agricultural school for orphans, both Jewish and non. 

With no action on the synagogue front, family members in 1868 filed partition lawsuits in Virginia and New York (where UPL lived most of the year)—the kind often used in contested divorce proceedings—to try to clear up Monticello’s fate. That year, courts in Richmond and New York ruled that Levy’s stipulation that Monticello would become a school for orphans was invalid. The courts then ordered that Monticello should be auctioned on the premises. The proceeds would be divided among Uriah Levy’s many heirs, who were allocated shares in the ownership of the property. 

At the time of the court decision, Jefferson Monroe Levy was sixteen-and-a-half years old. 

What followed was more than a decade of more legal wrangling over Monticello’s fate. Things were not settled, as I noted in Saving Monticello, until 1879. And it wasn’t a court ruling that did it.

Jefferson Monroe Levy had in the intervening years made a fortune as a big-time real estate and stock speculator. And he decided to take the fate of Monticello into his own hands beginning in the mid-1870s, and started buying out other family members’ inheritance shares.

 In June 1875, Jefferson Levy bought the Monticello inheritance shares of Virginia Lopez Levy Ree—Uriah Levy’s remarried widow—along with those of her husband, William J. Ree. In March 1876, JML purchased his parents Fanny and Jonas Phillips Levy’s Monticello shares.

Then, in October 1876, Levy bought the shares of Virginia Ree’s brother George Washington Lopez of Spanish Town, Jamaica. By April the following year, Jefferson Levy (below) had accumulated about half of Monticello’s shares. 

It is not a matter of record exactly how much Jefferson Levy paid the other heirs for their shares. The best guess is that it was approximately $10,000—a not insignificant sum in the late 1870s. 

On February 5, 1879, Levy family lawyer George Carr, an executor of Uriah Levy’s estate, placed an ad in a Charlottesville newspaper. It announced that Monticello and its surrounding acreage would be offered for sale “at public auction, to the highest bidder on the premises between 11 o’clock A.M., and 2 o’clock P.M., on Thursday, March 20th.” 

It appears that Jefferson Monroe Levy, a month shy of his 27^th birthday, was the only bidder at the March 20 auction. His winning bid was $10,050. That money was distributed to the other heirs.

But since Levy had bought out large portions from some of the other heirs, he received a good percentage of the purchase price. Jefferson Levy, in other words, had more or less bought Monticello from himself. 

CORRECTION: In last month’s newsletter I mentioned in passing that a full-length portrait of Uriah Levy in his Navy uniform (right) that had hung in Monticello was on display at the U.S. Naval Academy’s Museum in Annapolis. Jefferson Monroe Levy’s sister Amelia Mayhoff, who inherited the painting after his death in 1924, had donated the portrait to the Naval Academy in 1928. She did so after the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, which  bought the house from Levy in 1923, turned down her offer to keep it on display in the house.

I had forgotten that Levy descendant Rob Hoffman had told me last summer after he and his mother Nancy—a grandniece of Jefferson Levy, and the oldest surviving Levy Family descendant—visited the Naval Academy and learned that the large oil portrait was in storage, not on view. Here’s hoping it goes back on display sometime soon. 

EVENTS: Two scheduled for this month: 

On Wednesday, October 16, I’ll be doing a talk on Saving Monticello for the McLean (Virginia) Newcomers and Neighbors Club. 

On Sunday, October 20, I have talk and book signing at the Thomas Balch Library in Leesburg, Virginia, on my second house-history book, Huntland. It begins at 2:00 in the afternoon, and is free and open to the public. Registration is required, though. To do so, call 703-737-7195, email balchlib@leesburgva.gov or go to https://tinyurl.com/TBLEvents

I will be doing more events in the fall and winter, and in 2025, including talks on Saving Monticello. I also will be do talks and media interviews starting in early December for my new book, The Unlikely War Hero, a slice-of-life biography of the extraordinary Vietnam War story of Doug Hegdahl, the youngest and lowest ranking American prisoner held in Hanoi during the war. More info on that book at https://bit.ly/Hegdahl 

If you’d like to arrange a talk on that book, on Saving Monticello, or any of my other books, feel free to email me at marcleepson@gmail.com  

 For details on upcoming events, check the Events page on my website: marcleepson.com/events 

COMMERCE: I have brand-new paperback copies of Saving Monticello and a few as-new hardcovers. To order personalized, autographed copies, go to https://bit.ly/BookOrdering or email me directly at marcleepson@gmail.com 

I also have a stack of five of my other books: Flag: An American Biography; Desperate Engagement; What So Proudly We Hailed; and Ballad of the Green Beret, and Huntland.

You can read back issues of this newsletter at http://bit.ly/SMOnline 

 

September 2024

 

Saving Monticello: The Newsletter

The latest about the book, author events, and more

Newsletter Editor - Marc Leepson

 

Volume XXI, Number 9                                                         September 2024

 

A ‘Heroic Man’ and ‘Noble Officer’: Uriah Levy’s death in his 70^th year on March 22, 1862,* at his New York City East Village residence, 105 St. Mark’s Place, spawned headlines and accolades in newspapers in New York and Virginia, where he lived. 

The Richmond, Virginia. Daily Dispatch, in reporting Levy’s demise, for example, described him as “a man of good personal appearance” and “refined education” (although UPL had little formal schooling), and opined that he was “distinguished for many acts of personal bravery.” 

The article also noted that Uriah Levy “was the owner of Monticello, Jefferson’s residence in Virginia.” He was the owner in that newspaper’s view, because the Confederate States of America had confiscated Monticello after the Civil War began a year earlier as it was owned by a northerner. When Levy died, his lawyers had been contesting that seizure in the Confederate courts for about a year, a lawsuit that they would lose in the fall of 1864. 

Back in March of 1862, The New York Times and The New York Herald ran laudatory obits. The Herald described Uriah Levy as “a sterling American patriot” and “a heroic man and noble officer,” and didn’t stop there. A “faithful naval officer,” the paper said, he was known for his bravery and “the honesty of his character and motives.” 

Both newspapers provided details of his funeral, which started in the parlor of his house on St. Mark’s Place in New York, and which I briefly described, based on those articles, in Saving Monticello.

I wrote in the book that Levy had a Jewish funeral with patriotic flourishes and that Rabbi Jacques Judah Lyons, of New York’s Sephardic Congregation Shearith Israel (which the Herald described as “the West Nineteenth street synagogue congregation”), presided at the funeral. 

I didn’t report that Levy was laid out in a plain rosewood coffin. Nor that on its lid, the Herald noted, “were placed the sword, hat and coat of the deceased, while a solitary candle burned at the head and feet of the same. The parlor where the body reposed, and the bedchambers leading thereto were crowded with sympathizing friends and naval officers.” 

A large, full-length portrait of the Commodore hung on one of the walls of his house. Said portrait (in photo below) later was shipped to Monticello, and today resides in the U.S. Naval Academy Museum in Annapolis. 

Uriah Levy’s niece, Amelia Mayhoff, donated the portrait to the Academy following the death of her brother, Jefferson Levy, a few months after he sold Monticello to the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation in December 1923. 

The Rev. Mr. Lyons, as he was referred to in the newspapers, led the assembled in prayer at the house. Then, at around 2:00 in the afternoon, six U.S. Navy pallbearers caried the casket to a hearse outside with funereal music provided by a 20-piece Navy Brass Band from the U.S.S. North Carolina, a 74-gun ship of the line docked in New York that had been in service since 1820. 

A “large crowd of persons” stood outside the house to pay their respects. Three companies of Marines and a detachment of eighty sailors from the North Carolina accompanied the funeral hearse and carriages filled with family and friends as they moved slowly to the old dock at Grand Street, and then onto a ferry boat that took them across the East River to the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. The procession then made its way to Uriah Levy’s final resting place, Beth Olam Cemetery (below), then known as Cypress Hill Cemetery, which straddles the border between Brooklyn and Queens.

Arriving at the cemetery, The Times reported, “the deceased was placed in the receiving-house, when the mourners, in accordance with Jewish custom, made the circuit of it seven times, chanting verses illustrative of the mercy of God and the mortality of man.” 

The casket then “was lowered into the grave where the nearest relatives offered a prayer, threw dust upon the coffin and the obsequies were finished.” 

As I noted in the November 2020 Newsletter, Uriah Levy left specific instructions for the monument he wanted over his grave. He envisioned a full-length, life-sized statue of himself, either in iron or bronze, standing on a single block of granite sunk three feet in the ground. 

He specificized that the stature depicted him in the full uniform of a U.S. Navy captain, holding a scroll in his hand. The scroll was to be inscribed: “Uriah P. Levy, Captain in the United States Navy, Father of the law for the abolition of the barbarous practice of corporal punishment in the Navy of the United States.” 

But that was not to be because Shearith Israel decided that statues of the deceased are not appropriate in Jewish cemeteries. The request for a life-sized statue, “caused the congregation some discomfort,” according to the Shearith Israel website’s Beth Olam Cemetery page, which notes that while  it is important to honor the wishes of the deceased, it is also prohibited by halakha [Jewish law based on the Talmud] to erect a statue in human form.”  

Instead, the marble monument (below) features a flag-draped column adorned with a bas relief of a sailing ship and other naval and patriotic imagery. 

The epitaph, however, is nearly the same as what Uriah Levy envisioned. It reads: “In memory of Uriah P. Levy, Father of the Law for the abolition of the barbarous practice of corporal punishment in the Navy of the United States.”

*As I was fact-checking this, I saw that the Uriah Levy Wikipedia page listed his date of death as March 26, 1862. I knew that was incorrect because I had read a short death notice in the March 24, 1862, New York Herald—plus, 25 years ago when I was researching Saving Monticello, I found other solid evidence that Levy died on March 22 and said so in the book.  

But to triple check, I went to Find-a-Grave hoping there’d be an image of his giant gravestone. There was. And that confirmed the date of his death as March 22. Then I did what any historian would do: I changed the date to the correct one on Wikipedia. 

EVENTS: None scheduled for September, but I will be doing more events in the fall and winter, including talks on Saving Monticello. I also will be doing talks and media interviews starting in early December for my new book, The Unlikely War Hero, a slice-of-life biography of the extraordinary Vietnam War story of Doug Hegdahl, the youngest and lowest ranking American prisoner held in Hanoi during the war. 

If you’d like to arrange a talk on that book, on Saving Monticello, or any of my other books, feel free to email me at marcleepson@gmail.com 

For details on upcoming events, check the Events page on my website: marcleepson.com/events

COMMERCE: I have brand-new paperback copies of Saving Monticello and a few as-new hardcovers. To order personalized, autographed copies, go to https://bit.ly/BookOrdering or email me directly at marcleepson@gmail.com 

I also have a stack of six of my other books: Flag: An American Biography; Desperate Engagement; What So Proudly We Hailed; Flag: An American Biography; Ballad of the Green Beret, and Huntland.

August 2024

 Saving Monticello: The Newsletter

The latest about the book, author events, and more

Newsletter Editor - Marc Leepson

 

Volume XXI, Number 8                                                       August 2024

A VALIANT OFFICER; AN ACCOMPLISHED GENTLEMAN:  I included a detailed account in Saving Monticello and in this newsletter over the years of how Uriah Levy, while on an extended leave in Paris in the early 1830s during his U.S. Navy career, sought out the famed French sculptor 

 and commissioned a larger-than-life statue of Thomas Jefferson. 

And how Levy brought the statue home to the U.S. early in 1834, presented a plaster model to the City of New York, and donated the seven-and-a-half-foot bronze original to the people of the United States. 

And how the House and Senate accepted the gift and displayed the statue in the Capitol, then later in front of the White House, and ultimately brought it back to the Capitol, where it stands today in the Rotunda, the only statue in the building donated by a private citizen. 

In the book I also covered in detail how in the fall of 1833 or early in 1834 Uriah Levy spotted a newspaper advertisement by Monticello’s then owner, James Turner Barclay, saying that the “celebrated… former residence of Mr. Jefferson is offered for sale.” 

And that Levy made his way to Charlottesville, sought out Barclay, and on April 1, 1834, signed a contract to purchase Monticello and its surrounding acreage. 

I based the account of his time in Paris and the commissioning of the statue—from the fall of 1832 to early 1834—and what immediately came after on varied sources, including legal documents, newspaper articles, and congressional records. But I found some new information (to me) about the statue and about Uriah Levy recently after coming upon an article that I had not seen before in the April 4, 1834, Alexandria Gazette on the Library of Virginia’s online Virginia Chronicle state historical newspaper database. 

Under the above headline, the article, written by the unidentified (as was the journalistic custom of the day) Boston Post Washington correspondent, came out just three days after Levy and Barclay signed the paperwork for the sale of Monticello. Although that historic fact was not mentioned, I was fascinated to read, for the first time, an article written during that important week in Monticello’s history—and in Uriah Levy’s life. 

I’m happy to report that virtually all the facts in the article were accurate. The “new” information included the correspondent mentioning that the big bronze Jefferson statue came in at “52 cwt." That’s 52 hundredweight, or about 5,200 pounds. And that it probably cost Uriah Levy $14,000-$15,000. 

Noting that bronze is a “costly material,” the correspondent wrote that he gleaned the likely price from “those who profess to be acquainted with the value of this kind of statuary, Checking several online inflation calculators, $15,000 in 1834 would be the equivalent of at least $500,000 today.  

Levy, the article went on to say, “refuses to tell what it cost. He has the honor, whatever it may cost, of bestowing upon his fellow citizens the first statue of bronze that has ever been possessed in this country; and one too, of one of the first and greatest men of which this country can boast.”

The writer then described Levy’s heritage without mentioning the word “Jewish.” Saying Levy was a native of Philadelphia, which he was, and “a resident of Virginia,” which he wasn’t, the correspondent elaborated: “He is a descendant of the Maccabees, and a countryman of Isaiah. 

"He belongs to a race to whom, in Europe, Napoleon first extended the rights of citizenship; and whose example England has lately attempted to follow; on whom the constitution of this country has bestowed all the privileges of its trusts and honors; whose example every State in the Union, except Maryland, has followed.”* 

Then the writer lavished praise on Levy’s naval service, saying, “he is known as a valiant officer and an accomplished gentleman.” And he provided a physical description, that UPL was “about the middling height, say 5 feet 9, fine proportioned, dark complexion, with nothing very peculiar in his countenance, but a dark and piercing eye.” (Below: a photograph of UPL circa 1860 and a portrait of him circa 1815 as a young U.S. Navy Sailing Master) 

Levy was “apparently from thirty-seven to forty years of age,” the correspondent wrote. He was close; UPL was in his 42nd year. “He has spent considerable time in France and Germany on leave of absence, and acquired so much of a foreign accent, that, together with his mustache, he would not be taken for an American.”

In more than 25 years of studying the Levys, I have not found a whit of evidence that the Philadelphia-born Uriah P., a fifth-generation American, had any kind of “foreign accent.” Except, that is, in a discredited 1897 newspaper article that later became a pamphlet written by a New York journalist, Amos Cummings. Said article was little more than a vile, thinly veiled anti-Semitic attack on Jefferson M. Levy, who then owned Monticello, and his uncle, and contains made-up dialogue with Uriah speaking in some sort of Yiddish-German accent. 

As for the Boston Post correspondent, he ended his article with effusive praise for  Uriah Phillips Levy. To wit: His “munificence, and patriotism and valor are plenary evidence of his undisputed claim to American birth and citizenship.” 

* Maryland’s 1649 An Act Concerning Religion allowed only people who “believe[d] in Jesus Christ” to practice their religion in the colony. The state’s Constitution adopted in 1776 provided only that “persons professing the Christian religion are equally entitled to protection in their religious liberty.” That stricture remained in effect until the Maryland House of Delegates passed a law in 1826 that extended “the sect of people professing the Jewish religion the same rights and privileges that are enjoyed by Christians.”

EVENTS: None scheduled for August or September, but I will be doing more book talks and other events in the fall and winter. If you’d like me to do a talk on Saving Monticello or any of my other books, feel free to email me at marcleepson@gmail.com For details on events starting in October, go to marcleepson.com/events 

COMMERCE: To order a new, personally inscribed paperback of Saving Monticello, go to my website at https://bit.ly/BookOrdering or email me at marcleepson@gmail.com  I also have a few lightly used Saving Monticello hardcovers, and a stack of six of my other books: Flag: An American Biography; Desperate Engagement; What So Proudly We Hailed; Flag: An American Biography; Ballad of the Green Beret, and Huntland.