May 2025

 

Saving Monticello: The Newsletter

The latest about the book, author events, and more

Newsletter Editor - Marc Leepson

Volume XXII, Number 5                                                        May 2025

OUR MARQUIS: In October 2011 I felt honored to do a talk at the Jefferson Library at Monticello on my recently published book, Lafayette: Idealist General. Why a talk on a French General and statesman at the Jefferson Library? That’s an easy one. The 20-year-old Marquis de Lafayette, a major general in the Continental Army, immediately bonded with the 38-year-old Thomas Jefferson, the governor of Virginia, in April 1871 when they met near Richmond during the Revolutionary War.

Both spoke French; they found that they shared an affinity for the tenets of the Enlightenment; and they became life-long friends.

The men cemented that friendship in 1785 when the Continental Congress sent Jefferson to Paris to succeed Benjamin Franklin as the U.S. Minister (Ambassador) to France. Jefferson and Lafayette became confidants as Lafayette took an increasingly active part in French national affairs.

Lafayette, circa 1825

As a member of the Assembly of Notables, Lafayette was an outspoken proponent of establishing a constitutional monarchy with guarantees of individual freedom and a republican—versus an unfettered monarchical—government. In other words, what he fought for during the American Revolution against the British.

Lafayette wrote the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen in 1789, a seminal document that had many similarities to James Madison’s Bill of Rights and to the Declaration of Independence, which Thomas Jefferson was instrumental in writing.

Lafayette’s’ Declaration, which became the preamble to the French Constitution, in fact, included nearly the same “all men are created equal” language as Jefferson’s Declaration did.

Fast forward to Lafayette’s famed third and final tour of the United States when he was treated like a twenty-first century rock star. Everywhere he went—and he went just about everywhere, visiting all 24 states from July 1824 to September 1825—crowds gathered by the thousands to honor the Frenchman who served with distinction during the Revolutionary War at countless dinners, galas, parades, ceremonies, and other events.

One memorable event took place in November 1824 when Lafayette and his small entourage paid a visit to an ailing Thomas Jefferson at Monticello. I described that emotional occasion briefly in Saving Monticello and in this newsletter, and elaborated on in the Lafayette book.

The Marquis and his party spent ten days enjoying Jefferson's hospitality and being feted at the University of Virginia. This was the visit after which Jefferson wrote to a friend that he had to replenish his stock of red wine after the Frenchman left.

Lafayette stopped by again just before he left for home in August 1825, but stayed only a short time as Jefferson was ill. He died less than a year later on July 4, 1826.

Bill Barker & Charles Wissinger
as Jefferson and Lafayette
at Monticello in November 2024

UPL & THE MARQUIS: Back in 2011 during the Q&A after my talk, an audience member asked me if Uriah Levy and Lafayette had ever crossed paths. The answer was yes. And their meeting, in 1833 in Paris, had important ramifications for the future of Monticello

Uriah Levy, in the French capital between Navy postings, sought out the famed sculptor David d’Angers and commissioned a full-length marble sculpture of Thomas Jefferson. Then Levy called on the aging Marquis, telling him about the statute and asking to borrow a portrait of Jefferson by Thomas Sully that Lafayette had for the sculptor to use for the image of Jefferson’s face. 

During that meeting, it’s likely that Lafyette, who corresponded with Martha Jefferson Randolph in Virginia, asked Levy to return the favor by checking check on her, the family, and on Monticello. Levy agreed.

That is one feasible reason why after Levy came home to the U.S., he booked passage on a coach from Philadelphia to Charlottesville in the spring of 1834. When he arrived in Charlottesville, Levy found that Martha Randolph and the family were well, but that James Turner Barclay—who purchased Monticello from the Randolph’s in 1831—was anxious to sell the property. 

Soon thereafter, in April 1834, Levy signed a contract with Barclay to purchase Monticello and its 219 acres. The rest is history—the history that I tell in Saving Monticello.

Not to bury the lead, but this tale of Lafayette, Jefferson, and Levy came to mind because the University of Virginia Press has just published a second edition of Lafayette: Idealist General in paperback in conjunction with the two hundredth anniversary of the Marquis’ famed farewell tour

It’s available on the online booksellers and at your local bookstore. For a personally autographed copy, please go to this page on my website, https://bit.ly/BookOrdering. I’ll fulfill your order as soon as I receive it.

EVENTS AND COMMERCE:  I have a growing number of events scheduled this spring and summer, most of them 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.

I’m also lining up talks, podcasts and other events for the new paperback version of Lafayette: Idealist General.

Many are speaking engagements for historic preservation and other groups. Some are open to the public. For details, go to this page on my website: marcleepson.com/events

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

To order a signed copied, go to https://bit.ly/BookOrdering I also have new paperback copies of Flag: An American Biography; Desperate Engagement; and The Ballad of the Green Beret.

April 2025

 

Saving Monticello: The Newsletter

The latest about the book, author events, and more

                                                    Newsletter Editor - Marc Leepson

Volume XXII, Number 4                                                        April 2025

 

THE GARDENS: Apropos of Historic Garden Week in Virginia from April 26-May 3 this year—and the fact that the annual statewide event began in 1927 when the Garden Club of Virginia held a flower show to raise funds to preserve trees on Monticello’s lawn planted by Thomas Jefferson—I thought about what I wrote about the mountaintop’s extensive flower gardens in Saving Monticello.

Mea culpa: I did not go into depth on the subject in the book. However, I did note that James Turner Barclay, who purchased the property in 1831 from the Randolph family five years after Jefferson’s death, at the very least did not properly care for the Sage of Monticello’s Jefferson’s carefully planned and cultivated flower gardens—primarily the twenty oval-shaped beds planted with different flowers around the house and encircling the West Lawn.

I extensively covered Jefferson Levy’s work repairing and restoring Monticello itself after taking ownership in 1879 at a time when the house was in terrible condition after nearly twenty years of neglect. And I wrote that he, didn’t get around to working on refurbishing the gardens until near the turn of the 20^th century.

Jefferson’s “orchards and terraced gardens, the serpentine flower-borders on the western lawn, and the beautiful ‘walkabout’ walks and drives have all disappeared,” a visitor to Monticello wrote in 1887. Not long after that, Levy vowed to restore Monticello’s grounds “as nearly as possible to its condition in Jefferson's time.”

Less than ten years later, in April 1898, the Charlottesville Daily Progress reported favorably on recent work Levy had done on the grounds. “The banks on either side of the drive from the porter’s lodge to the mansion have been sewn with grass seed, and at intervals rare and beautiful flowers have been planted, which are now blooming,” an April 28 article said. “The lawns are in perfect sod and on them are late acquisitions of flowering shrubs.”

 

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

 

I recently discovered a few more details about how Jefferson Levy continued lavishing attention on the grounds until he sold the property in 1923 to the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation. The info came from a short chapter in Historic Gardens of Virginia, a book published in 1921 by the James River Garden Club, which had been founded in 1915 in Richmond.  

The book’s three-page report on Monticello, written by the club’s founder, Juanita Massie Patterson, offers a look at the gardens and grounds at the time, and credits Jefferson Levy for not making any changes to “the house and gardens,” and for “restoring Monticello to its original beauty.”

Patterson starts with describing what she saw as she entered the property through a gate at the “outer entrance” at the gatekeeper’s lodge that Levy had recently built.

“The drive to the house” from there to the house, she wrote, goes through “the woods…, enchanting in early spring. [T]he luxuriant growth of Scotch broom, with its pendant yellow blossoms, carpets the ground beneath, forming a veritable cloth of gold.”

The drive took her past the Jefferson family graveyard, then through a gate that opened onto the West Front’s lawn. The garden there, she wrote, “is arranged in a chain of rectangular plots, with grass walks between.”

Just before getting to the house, she wrote, “may still be seen the old-time shrubs on either side of the path leading to the house. A large club of lilacs and syringa with modern privet hides the exit of the underground passage to the house.”

By the way, in homage to Thomas Jefferson’s “revolutionary” gardening, the Shops at Monticello offers a large selection of heirloom seeds and plants for sale at the mountaintop’s Center. Many also can be ordered on line throughout the years at https://bit.ly/MontGardens To scroll through Monticello’s All Plants Archive, go to https://bit.ly/PlantArchive 

 

EVENTS AND COMMERCE:  I have a growing number of events scheduled this spring and summer, most of them 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.

Many are speaking engagements for historic preservation and other groups. Some are open to the public. For details, go to this page on my website: marcleepson.com/events

If you’d like to arrange a talk on The Unlikely War Hero, Saving Monticello, or any of my other books, please email me at marcleepson@gmail.com  The book is now in its fourth printing, with a fifth on the way.

 To order a signed copy, go to https://bit.ly/BookOrdering I also have new paperback copies of Saving Monticello, as well as copies of Flag: An American Biography; Desperate Engagement; and Ballad of the Green Beret. 

March 2025

 

Saving Monticello: The Newsletter

The latest about the book, author events, and more

Newsletter Editor - Marc Leepson

Volume XXII, Number 3                                                        March 2025

 

ALIEN ENEMIES: The bizarre, out-of-the-blue invoking of 1798 Alien Enemies Act during peacetime by the current U.S. president to deport undesirable Venezuelan “aliens” brought to mind something I discovered while doing the research for Saving Monticello twenty-five years ago: another North American Alien Enemies Act, this one a Civil War law enacted in the Confederate States of America’s Congress in August 1861, less than five months after the conflict began.

The “alien enemies” in question in this case were citizens of non-rebelling states who owned property in the eleven Confederate states. The law mandated the removal of said residents from those southern states. It also authorized the seizing of property in the South owned by the ousted non-southerners. 

That included Monticello since the property’s then-owner, U.S. Navy Captain Uriah P. Levy, lived most of the year in New York City when the War of 1812 veteran wasn’t sailing the seven seas. 

Proceedings began on October 10, 1861, to “sequestrate ‘Monticello’ as the property of an alien enemy,” the Richmond Examiner reported, since “the present owner, Levy, [was] abroad… in charge of a United States ship of war.” Actually, Levy was in Washington, D.C., at that time, preparing to take over the Navy’s Court-Martial Board.

The Examiner felt the need to out point out that the “people of Charlottesville” called “the late owner of Monticello ‘Commodore Levee.’ He is a first Captain in the United States Navy, and of Jewish parentage.”*

Monticello “has been confiscated,” Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper reported four months later, “with all its lands, negroes, cattle, farming utensils, furniture, paintings, wines, etc., together with two other farms belonging to the same owner, and valued at from $70,000 to $80,000.” That New York newspaper went on to expound on Uriah Levy’s patriotism and military service, and concluded: “Certainly no officer in the army or navy has been so victimized by the rebels.” 

Uriah Levy fought the confiscation in the Confederate courts. After he died on March 22, 1862, his estate’s lawyer, George Carr, continued pressing the case. The CSA finally prevailed legally on September 27, 1864, at a time when the South’s treasury was in dire need of cash.

On November 17, an auction took place on the mountaintop. Monticello, its grounds and its contents, and hundreds of acres of land Levy had purchased around Charlottesville were put on the block. So were Levy’s enslaved people.

What a New York Times correspondent on the scene termed “a large number of people” showed up for the sale. That included Uriah Levy’s brother Jonas, then living in Wilmington, North Carolina, who had his eye on buying the house.

The crowd also included Lieutenant Col. Benjamin Franklin Ficklin, Jr., of the 50th Virginia Regiment, who outbid Levy and everyone else and plunked down $80,500 in Confederate money for Monticello and its adjoining acreage. Levy’s estate, under terms of the act, was not compensated.

As I wrote in the book, Ficklin (below) also bought a bust of Jefferson for $50. Other Levy items sold that day included a pianoforte, a marble-topped sideboard, a washstand, cattle, oxen, a threshing machine, and 19 enslaved people. Jonas Levy paid $5,400 for an enslaved man named John, and took home a model of one of his brother’s ship’s, the Vandalia, for $100. The CSA’s total take was $350,000.'

Ficklin—a colorful and adventurous character, had been wounded in the Mexican War and later went on to be one of the founders of the legendary Pony Express. He returned to his regiment after the auction, and most likely never spent a night in the house that Jefferson built,  

Although the sale took place in November 1864, Ficklin did not receive title from the District Court until March 17, 1865, three weeks before Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox ending the war. According to Ficklin family lore, Benjamin Ficklin, a bachelor, brought his aging father, Rev. Ficklin, to live at Monticello, where he died.

Other reports indicate that several other members of the family moved into Monticello, including Capt. Ficklin's youngest sister Susan and her husband Joseph Hardesty, and a brother known as “Dissolute Willie.” A family story has it that Willie sold some of the Jefferson furniture left in the house to pay gambling debts, and that their father died in Jefferson’s bed.

For his part, B.F. Ficklin, Jr., who is buried in Maplewood Cemetery in Charlottesville, died at age 44 while dining at the Willard Hotel in Washington when a fishbone lodged in his throat and the doctor who tried to remove it severed an artery.

* Uriah Levy was given the command of the U.S. Navy’s entire American Mediterranean Squadron on January 7, 1860, a position that entitled him to the honorary rank of Commodore. Although he never was commissioned a commodore, the Navy officially recognized him as one and referred to him as a Commodore in all official communications.

 

THE AI STATUE: In the January issue I mentioned that I’d recently learned that in 1881, two years after he acquired Monticello from his uncle’s estate, Jefferson Monroe Levy (a son of Jonas Levy) had written an article in which he said he would donate $500 toward “the erection of a statue of Jefferson in Central park [sic]” in New York City.

I confirmed that no such statue ever was erected, but that new information got me thinking about what an 1880s statue in Central Park would look like. I decided, for the first time, to ask an AI website to create an image. I was singularly unsuccessful.

When I mentioned that to Hunt Lyman, an old friend who has studied and written about AI for several years, he said he’d take a look. In less than a New York minute—or so it seemed—Hunt came up with the image below.

I think it looks convincing, though I’m not sure why the statue would be in the middle of a walkway. Plus, I had to laugh at the “Central Park” sign on the lamppost.

 

EVENTS AND COMMERCE:  I have a growing number of events scheduled starting this spring and summer, most of them 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. Many are speaking engagements for historic preservation and other groups. Some are open to the public. For details, go to this page on my website: marcleepson.com/events

If you’d like to arrange a talk on The Unlikely War Hero, Saving Monticello, or any of my other books, please email me at marcleepson@gmail.com  The book is now in its fourth printing, with a fifth on the way. 

To order a signed copy, go to https://bit.ly/BookOrdering I also have new paperback copies of Saving Monticello, as well as paperback copies of Flag: An American Biography; Desperate Engagement; and Ballad of the Green Beret 

February 2025

 

Saving Monticello: The Newsletter

The latest about the book, author events, and more

Newsletter Editor - Marc Leepson

Volume XXII, Number 2                                                        February 2025

 

THE BACHELORS: Coincidence or not, both Uriah Levy and his nephew Jefferson Monroe Levy were long-time bachelors. Uriah married late in life (more on that below), and, like his life-long, never-married nephew, he did not have any children.

Valentine’s Day month 2025 seems like an appropriate time to look at the love lives of the two men who owned (and repaired, preserved, and restored) Monticello from 1836 when Uriah Levy took ownership of the estate, to 1923 when Jefferson Levy sold it to the just-formed Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation.

Uriah Levy led a bachelor’s life until his 61st year in 1853 when he courted and married Virginia Lopez, who was born on September 25, 1835, less than a year before Uriah Levy took possession of Monticello. She was 18 years old.

That may seem a tad scandalous, but consider, too, that Virginia Lopez was Uriah Levy’s niece, the youngest of the three children of Uriah’s sister Frances (known as Fanny) and Abraham Lopez, who lived in Kingston, Jamaica. 

The only known photograph of Uriah Levy, taken just prior to his death in 1862

In taking Virginia’s hand in marriage, as I noted in Saving Monticello, Uriah was following an ancient, if obscure, Jewish tradition that obligated the closest unmarried male relative of a recently orphaned or widowed woman in financial difficulties to marry her. Said financial troubles all but certainly stemmed from the fact that Abraham Lopez—sometimes referred to as Judge Lopez—had fallen on hard financial times by the time he died in 1849 when Virgina was 14 years old. Before that, however, he had prospered and provided well for his family. The well-off Lopezes had the wherewithal, for one thing, to send Virginia to boarding school in England. 

In the absence of the discovery of a marriage license or any other primary sources to prove it, it appears that the May-December couple wed in the fall of 1853. And that the nuptials took place in New York City where Uriah lived and where Virginia and her mother Fanny moved from Jamaica sometime after Judge Lopez’s death four years earlier. We also know that sometime after the wedding, Uriah moved Virginia and Fanny into his large townhouse at 107 St. Mark's Place in the East Village in Manhattan. 

Fanny Levy died in 1857 and sometime after that Uriah’s unmarried sister, Amelia, moved into the house on St. Mark’s with her brother and young sister-in-law, Virginia. We know that because in 1860 the U.S. Census (above) listed Commodore and Virginia Levy, age 60 and 25, living in Manhattan, along with Amelia Levy, 50, and an Irish servant named Nora McGrath, 22. Uriah and Amelia’s places of birth were listed as Philadelphia and Virginia’s as “West Indies.”

Uriah Levy died at age 70 in that house on March 22, 1862. Virginia Lopez Levy later remarried and died on May 5, 1925 in New York at age 90—63 years after Uriah Levy’s death.

 

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

As for the lifelong bachelor Jefferson Levy, who was born in New York in 1852—the year before UPL and Virginia Lopez married—his name regularly popped up in the society pages of the (many) New York City newspapers and those in Washington, D.C., and Virginia, as he led an extravagant Gilded Age lifestyle after making a fortune in real estate and stock speculation in the 1870s and ‘80s.

 Jefferson Levy traveled widely and often, typically in the company of other upper-crust late nineteenth and early twentieth century globetrotters. 

Jefferson M. Levy

On one of his many social sojourns, Jefferson Levy crossed the Atlantic to spend some leisure time in England in the summer of 1902. The man the Washington Post described as “one of the most conspicuous bachelor hosts of the London season,” among other things, gave a dinner at a fancy London hotel in August in the early days of the reign of King Edward VII and its Edwardian Era upper class excesses.

Jefferson Levy, who, like his uncle, lived in New York City, repaired to Monticello early in September that year, where he threw a big party for the artist George Burroughs Torrey (1863-1942), who had painted a portrait of Levy that he had placed in Monticello. 

The conspicuous bachelor sometimes was linked to eligible woman of his social strata, but no evidence has surfaced that he came close to marrying. Levy, it appears, was very comfortable in his bachelorhood. For example, in the summer of 1912, when rumors circulated in Washington that he was engaged to be married to Flora Wilson, the socially prominent daughter of Secretary of Agriculture James Wilson*, Levy—a Democratic congressman from New York at the time—picked up his phone and called The New York Times to set the record straight. 

In a short article in the September 3, 1912 Times, oddly headlined “L.M. Levy Is Not to Wed,” the paper noted that Levy called the Times’ Washington office from Monticello to let the paper know there was no truth to the rumor. 

That was the summer in which Levy faced a nationwide effort by Maude Littleton to induce Congress to take Monticello from him and turn it into a government-run presidential house museum—an effort he vigorously opposed in congressional hearings and in the court of public opinion. 

The rumors that he was engaged to Flora Lewis—a suffragist and trained coloratura operatic soprano—had “no other basis than the possible desire of somebody to make capital out of the fact that Miss Wilson recently came to his rescue by publicly declaring against the federal acquisition of Monticello over his protest,” The Times reported.

“Mr. Levy said he regretted the report of an engagement and there was no foundation for it.”

Flora Wilson, 1912

*A former Congressman from Iowa, James Wilson had served as the Secretary of Agriculture since 1897. He stepped down early in 1913, and has the distinction of being the longest-serving Cabinet secretary in U.S. history.

EVENTS AND COMMERCE:  I have a growing number of events scheduled starting in March, most of them 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. For details on upcoming events, check the Events page on my website: marcleepson.com/events 

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

The Unlikely War Hero’s first printing sold out before the official December 17 publication date and it became the Number 1 bestselling Vietnam War History book on Amazon. The second printing sold out not long after it came out in mid-January, and the book is now in its third printing.   

I have a few copies of the first printing. To order one, go to https://bit.ly/BookOrdering  I also have brand-new paperback copies of Saving Monticello and a few as-new hardcovers, as well as paperback copies of Flag: An American Biography; Desperate Engagement; and Ballad of the Green Beret.

To order personalized, autographed book, go to bit.ly/BookOrdering or email me directly at marcleepson@gmail.com 

January 2025

 

Saving Monticello: The Newsletter

The latest about the book, author events, and more

Newsletter Editor - Marc Leepson

Volume XXII, Number 1                                                        January 2025

 

 

MEMORIALS & MONUMENTS: The founders of the foundation that formed to buy Monticello in 1923 from Jefferson Levy incorporated under the name, The Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation. That’s presumably because the foundation’s goal, in the parlance of the times, was to own and operate Monticello as a “memorial” to Thomas Jefferson. The organization dropped “Memorial” from its name in 2000.

This mini rumination on the word “memorial” was spurred by my continuing search for information about the Levy Family and Monticello. That quest recently led me to an 1881 newspaper article I hadn’t seen (Thank you, Library of Congress’ Chronicling America historical newspaper database) with an intriguing tidbit about Jefferson Levy that I hadn’t come across.  

Said article was penned by Lyon Gardiner Tyler (1853-1935), a son of President John Tyler, and published in The Memphis Daily Appeal on January 2, 1881. J.G. Tyler, an 1875 graduate of the University of Virginia, was the principal of a private school in Memphis at the time. He went on to serve as President of the College of William and Mary—Thomas Jefferson’s alma mater—from 1888-1919.

While expounding on the greatness of the Sage of Monticello, J.G. Tyler mentioned that he had learned that Jefferson Levy—who had owned Monticello for less than two years at that point—had written an article in which he said he would donate $500 toward “the erection of a statue of Jefferson in Central park [sic]” in New York City. As that was news to me, I tried to confirm it, or at least find more information about the proposed statue. Searching through the best primary sources, though, I couldn’t find anything more on it.

I therefore can only speculate that Jefferson Levy’s reverence for Thomas Jefferson and his desire to help build a monumental statue was influenced by his uncle Uriah Levy’s decision to buy Monticello in 1834 out of admiration for Jefferson, especially his strong support for freedom of religion.

A year earlier, when then U.S. Navy Lt. Uriah Levy was in France, he expressed that reverence by commissioning a full-length statue of Thomas Jefferson by the top sculptor of the day, David d’Angers, which today is prominently displayed in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda. I wrote about UPL and the statue in Saving Monticello and in several issues of this newsletter.

There are a slew of statues in Central Park—from Hans Christiaan Anderson to Daniel Webster—but, alas, none of Thomas Jefferson. There are plenty of Jefferson statues throughout the nation, however. Most of them were commissioned starting early in the twentieth century.

The Memorial

The most monumental Jefferson statue is Rudulf Evans’ towering, 19-foot-tall sculpture that is the centerpiece of the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, D.C. Not surprisingly, Jefferson Monroe Levy was an early proponent of a memorial to Jefferson in the nation’s capital.

In February 1903—a year after it was decided that the Tidal Basin would be the site of a future unspecified memorial and two years after Jefferson Levy had completed his first term in the House of Representatives—he was appointed as one of several dozen vice presidents (see the shortened list above) of the recently formed Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association of the United States.

That Washington, D.C. group soon began to raise funds and lobby for a memorial to the “author of the Declaration of Independence,” as the above membership card puts it, to be located in the Nation’s Capital.

It appears that the TJMAUS ceased functioning in 1907 without making any traction in its mission. But in 1926, two years after Jefferson Monroe Levy’s death, Congress took up the cause and considered a resolution to authorize the erection of a memorial to Thomas Jefferson for the first time.

It took eight years for the idea to gain traction on the Hill, but on June 26, 1934, the Senate and House approved a Joint Resolution establishing the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Commission (TJMC) with a mandate to build a memorial to its namesake at the intersection of Constitution and Pennsylvania Avenues in downtown D.C. Congress appropriated $3 million for construction. The following year, the commission commissioned the architect John Russell Pope, who designed the National Archives building four years earlier, to draw up the plans for the Jefferson Memorial.

In 1936, President Franklin Roosevelt asked the commission to chose a larger site for the memorial. They decided on the south bank of the Tidal Basin and construction began in late 1937

FDR laid the cornerstone two years later. Evans received the commission to sculpt the statue in 1941 and the memorial was dedicated before 5,000 spectators—including three dozen Jefferson descendants—on Thomas Jefferson’s birthday, April 13, during the World War II year of 1943.

As I wrote in Saving Monticello, the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation took a leading role in the movement to build the national memorial to Thomas Jefferson beginning in 1926, when Congress first proposed it. That included Stuart Gibboney, the first head of the Foundation, being named chair of the Memorial Commission in 1938.

Gibboney (1876-1944), a Virginia-born New York City lawyer who specialized in banking litigation and was a mover and shaker in the national Democratic Party, opened the dedication ceremonies in 1943. Following the invocation by the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church in America, came the singing of the National Anthem during which the giant statue, which had been covered with American flags, was unveiled.

President Roosevelt spoke next in an address that was broadcast live on national radio. He called the memorial a “shrine to freedom,” and went on to talk about Jefferson’s challenges and those facing the nation during the dark days of World War II.

Jefferson, FDR said, “faced the fact that men who will not fight for liberty can lose it. We, too, have faced that fact. He lived in a world in which freedom of conscience and freedom of mind were battles still to be fought through—not principles already accepted of all men. We, too, have lived in such a world. He believed, as we believe, that men are capable of their own government, and that no king, no tyrant, no dictator can govern for them as well as they can govern for themselves…. 

“The words which we have chosen for this Memorial speak Jefferson’s noblest and most urgent meaning; and we are proud indeed to understand it and share it: ‘I have sworn upon the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.’”

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 

The book had a strong start. Not long after The Unlikely War Hero arrived in bookstores and at online booksellers in early December, it became the bestselling Vietnam War History book on Amazon 

The first printing then sold out within a week. The second printing, on January 17, sold out immediately due to the huge number of backorders after the first printing was gone. The third printing is scheduled for the first week of February.  I have some copies of the first printing. To order a signed copy, go to my website, https://www.marcleepson.com/ 

If you’d like to arrange a talk on The Unlikely War Hero, 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 Flag: An American Biography; Desperate Engagement; What So Proudly We Hailed; Ballad of the Green Beret; and Huntland.

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